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QUANTIFICATION AND SOCIAL INDICATORS *1
1897
The quantitative oppositions of societies merit our consideration for a moment. Whether simultaneous
or successive, symmetrical or rhythmic—especially if rhythmic—they have a reality and an
importance that need to be clearly defined and delimited. First of all, what are social quantities?
What is their nature and their relationship to the psychological quantities of social beings and to the
physical quantities these beings possess? From whatever angle it is considered, a society easily
reveals things which increase or decrease, highs or lows, among which only a small number can
successfully be measured by statistics. This does not mean to say that these measurable quantities are
more pure or more real quantities than the others. Their privilege of being measurable usually derives
from some external sign which is conveniently perceptible and which, despite their insufficient
homogeneity, designates them for calculation, whereas others, much more homogeneous but less
visible, elude the calculators.
Population advances or declines; a religion gains or loses followers; and a political party,
adherents. A language is spoken by an increasing or decreasing number of individuals. Primary,
secondary, and higher education expands or declines. Production and consumption of a commodity, a
cloth, any industrial article, augments or diminishes. 1 A vice, such as drunkenness or alcoholism, a
type of crime, such as indecent assault on children, becomes more frequent or more rare. These many
things therefore can be called dimensions, since they are capable of augmentation or diminution and
are measured by statistics; and there are a host of others which, while not statistically measurable, are
no less certain. But these are derived and complex dimensions in which the physical and vital
elements are mixed in with the social ones as heterogeneous elements are mixed with homogeneous
ones: it is important to distinguish what there is in them that is truly quantitative and truly social. Shall
we say that this something is one or the other of the two psychological quantities that we know about,
belief and desire? No, because even though these two psychological quantities are always found
combined and summed up in social quantities, the social quantities differ greatly from the
psychological ones, precisely because they both derive from and are the sum and the combination of
the psychological quantities—the sum, thanks to imitative propagation; the combination, thanks to
logic. Properly speaking, social quantities do not exist because psychological quantities exist but
because there exist mental things, either quantitative or even qualitative, which repeat themselves and
accumulate by repeating themselves. Thus even if everything about each of us were affective and
sensate, with nothing homogeneous, it would suffice for our minds to reflect one another and to
communicate their states of being to one another in order for the imitative propagation of each of
these states to become a dimension expressible in regularly increasing or decreasing numbers. And
are we really ever sure, even in physics, that beneath the quantities we measure, such as the intensity
of light or the pitch of a sound, there are not hidden realities, complicated and picturesque but more
or less alike, which are repeated in such great numbers that their true discontinuity acquires the false
air of continuity? In chemistry it is quite probable that the elements of a substance are small and
different individual items, which are, however, similar in some respects, and it is these aspects that
we consider when we confer the name of quantity to them as a group, to the whole mass of them.
The same holds true for men. Statistically they are counted as similar—as French, English,