 |
NUMBERS
Volume 68 No. 2 (Summer 2001) Arien Mack, Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
This issue on “Numbers” covers ground that has
been
explored many times before, but it is a process that probably cannot be
exhausted. For a journal that lives in a social science faculty, the
decision
to organize this issue seemed long overdue, and its appropriateness was
recently confirmed by the welcomed arrival of our new dean, Kenneth
Prewitt,
who until early January of this year was the director of the United
States
Census Bureau. The decision to proceed with this issue occurred in the
midst of the Y2K hysteria, which, if it did anything, focused the
attention
of the nation on what havoc a change in but a single number
might create. We escaped from that potentially crippling and wildly
hyped disaster without a scratch, but were more recently reminded of
the
power of numbers in the congressional fight over the proper way to
conduct
the census.
However, even if we had not had these
well-publicized
warnings about the power of numbers, the many questions surrounding the
use of numbers and what they represent would have remained important.
This
issue was designed to look at these questions about the roles numbers
play
in society and in our lives, both by looking back at how some of these
questions arose and how they have been and are being
answered.
Arien Mack
Table of Contents
Notes on
Contributors
(at time of publication)
Margo Anderson is Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (2000), coauthor (with Stephen Fienberg) of Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (1999), and author of The American Census: A Social History (1988).
Claudia Baracchi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty. Her most recently published paper is “Meditations on the Philosophy of History” in Research in Phenomenology (2001), and her book, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic, is forthcoming in December 2001.
Marcel Boumans is Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. His work on methodology, models, measurement, and mathematics includes the article “Built-in Justification” in Models as Mediators (Morgan and Morrison, eds., 1999). His paper, “Fisher’s Instrumental Approach to Index Numbers,” is forthcoming in History of Political Economy (2001).
Martin Bulmer is Professor of Sociology and Director of the
ESRC
Social Survey Question Bank at the University
of Surrey. He is coeditor of Racism (1999) and Citizenship Today: The
Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall (1996), and the author of The
Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalisation, Diversity, and the
Rise
of Sociological Research (1984).
Alain Desrosières is a member of INSEE, the French national statistical office. He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (1998) and is currently engaged in research about the sociology of statistics, especially their construction and their uses.
Otniel E. Dror, M.D. and Ph.D., is Lecturer and Head of the History of Medicine Section in the Medical Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This article is part of a larger book project tentatively titled The Science of Passion: Modernity and the Study of Emotions. Recent publications have appeared in Isis (1999) and Configurations (1999).
