State statistics both describe and actively constitute the population they govern

Evidence

Foucault speaks in Security, Territory, Population of the knowledge of the state, the knowledge it comes to acquire, diffuse, and circulate as “necessary” for governing. This is not just a knowledge of the law, but a knowledge – as he puts it – of the state’s reality, of its population, deemed necessary to govern. Such knowledge includes “forces and resources” comprising the state – its demography, its conditions of being and distribution, but also its social and natural ecology. Foucault calls this summation of knowledge “statistics.” At the very least, statistics synthesize the information comprising the state, making it up, offering a snapshot of state composition. But statistics also inform state-making, providing the data inputs fashioning it, making possible the modalities by which it governs, its modes of doing or carrying things out. Statistics, in short, order the state’s constitution of and relation to population. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1727 (#expands, via linked claim)

From its inception, the collation of official statistics has been constitutive of state power and of many other modes of social organisation also. The co-ordinated administrative control achieved by modern governments is inseparable from the routine monitoring of “official data” in which all contemporary states engage. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 107 (#expands, via linked claim)

To deny that one can construct a sociology, understood in the sense of a science of society, that is a science of history and politics, which is not co-terminous with the philosophy of praxis itself, does not mean that one cannot build up an empirical compilation of practical observations which extend the sphere of philology as traditionally understood. If philology is the methodological expression of the importance of ascertaining and precising particular fact-in their unique and unrepeatable individuality, one cannot however exclude the practical utility of isolating certain more general “laws of tendency” corresponding in the political field to the laws of statistics or to the law of large numbers which have helped to advance various of the natural sciences. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1530 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Statistical representativeness and the welfare state emerged together; Modern state concern for subjects targets ‘population’ via political economy; Statistics are knowledge that constitutes and orders the state — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1727 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Statistics are knowledge that constitutes and orders the state #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1727
• Official statistics constitute state administrative power rather than merely recording it #expands (0.95) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 107
• Statistical laws apply to politics only while masses remain passive #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1530
• Population is a chaotic category that must be broken into internal relations of difference #complicates (0.72)