How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State

Abstract

The various parts of this collective book examine the way in which over the past two centuries the social sciences have acquired more-or-less stable forms, and have contributed to structuring specific discourses about society. Everyone agrees on the importance of the consolidation of these sciences — a consolidation that operates in two dimensions, institutional and cognitive. To consolidate something means to give it the ability to endure, to be transmitted from hand to hand and to resist possible deformations. According to Durkheim, “social facts” can only be “treated as things” to the extent that they possess these attributes, which thus render them comparable to any other scientific object.