Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Midcentury China and the Soviet Union

Abstract

Is there a correct way to ascertain social fact? As late as the 1950s, the scientific community remained divided over this question. Its resolution involved not just epistemological and theoretical debates on the unity or disunity of statistical science but also practical considerations surrounding state-capacity building. For scientists in places like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, at stake was the very ability to realize the kind of planned economic growth that socialist countries idealized. The solution they chose reformulated statistics explicitly as a social science, salvaging it from what they then dismissed as the tainted, bourgeois, and socially unproductive pursuit of mathematical statistics. This distinction—most tangibly understood as the rejection of all probabilistic methods—had implications for both the ways in which data was collected and the ways in which it was analyzed.