2b.portert, French Engineers91

Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers
Author(s): Theodore M. Porter

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 2, Disciplinarity (Summer, 1991), pp. 245-265
Published by: Duke University Press
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Objectivity and Authority:
How French Engineers Reduced
Public Utility to Numbers
Theodore M. Porter
History, UCLA
Objectivity and Science

The wisdom of the ancients still meant something to nineteenth-
century quantifiers, and they were known to express their very mod-
ern dogma in a dead language: Mundum numeri regunt. As metaphysics,
"numbers rule the world" may be timeless, but only in the nineteenth
century did this empire of counting and calculating begin to extend
itself over public life. Depending on the ideology and temperament
of the interpreter, this quantification of almost everything has usually
been explained either as a natural outcome of the ceaseless growth of
scientific knowledge or as part of a technocratic power grab. I want to
argue here that the scientists cannot stand alone as either heroes or
villains. The intrusion of objectivity into the domain of politics has as
much to do with changes in the political order as with the growth of
science. Or rather, this massive growth of quantification shows that the
identity of knowledge and power announced by Bacon is more nearly
accurate than we might suppose in a world where politics appears
irrational, and science (especially quantitative social science) abstract
and otherworldly.
This research was supported by fellowships from the Earhart Foundation, the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I thank Lor-
raine Daston, Margaret Schabas, and Cecil Smith for helpful comments.
Poetics Today 12:2 (Summer 1991). Copyright ? 1991 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/91/$2.50.
246 Poetics Today 12:2
Bacon's maxim is most often taken to refer to the scientific basis

of new technology. Although this relationship is now generally recog-
nized to be neither simple nor monocausal, the importance of the
natural sciences for economic power has only become more obvious
with time. "High" technology connects with a narrower, political sense
of power because political decisions have to be made about it, and it
is often held that only specialists have the knowledge to make these
decisions wisely. This, however, is not enough to explain the vastly
increased authority that numbers have come to command in public
life. It is not the unchallenged authority of experts, but rather resis-
tance to them, that most often forces administrators to express their
reasoning in numbers. Precisely where the experts are not allowed
to operate behind closed doors, they become obliged to offer justifi-
cation for the choices they make, sometimes even arguments for the
choices they prefer but lack the power to make. The language of ob-
jectivity, usually calculation, is appealing because it seems to imply
honesty and disinterestedness, and because it combines an element of
ostensible democratic openness with a large measure of exclusivity. It
is mainly for these reasons that numbers have become such important
instruments of political power.
The usefulness of the language of science in the political domain is
due in part to the social character of science itself. Objectivity means,
first of all, intersubjectivity, the possibility of mutual understanding.
Among modern scholars and scientists, the ethic of publication stands
unchallenged. Publication is useless unless communication is possible,
and the appeal of numbers is due in part to their role in rendering tacit
reasoning explicit. Of course, we should not exaggerate the triumphs
of objectivism. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1958) is a clas-
sic argument for the unavoidable importance of tacit knowledge and
private skills, especially in experimentation. Recent sociologists have
reinforced and extended his conclusions. H. M. Collins, for example,
offers several case studies to suggest that true replication of experi-
mental findings is extremely difficult and not at all usual. Certainly, it
takes far more to run an experiment than a knowledge of the scientific
principles it is supposed to demonstrate. Collins argues from several
instances, most notably the TEA laser, that replication generally de-
pends on a kind of knowledge that goes beyond published accounts-
that involves direct or mediated experience in the laboratory where
it was invented. To duplicate technologies or repeat experiments this
way, Collins argues, amounts to testing copies against the original and
cannot count as independent replication (Collins 1985).1
1. Collins and Polanyi aim to demystify science, to show it as a human activity,
but it is not clear that one should draw comfort from their conclusions. As Steve
Fuller (1991) points out, if scientific knowledge is really so personal, it becomes
impossible for outsiders to challenge scientific results and conclusions.
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 247
Other sociological studies of experiments, too (though perhaps not

independently), suggest that complete objectivity must remain elusive.
It stands, nevertheless, as an ideal, one that has played a large role
in shaping science. Scientists were disciples of Henry Ford avant la
lettre. Their interest in standardization has, at least since the early
nineteenth century, been unflagging. It was expressed in the enor-
mous effort by late nineteenth-century physicists to define standard
units of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, mechanical work, and the
like (Cahan 1989; Smith and Wise 1989). Their well-known hope that
the constants of nature could be known to a few more decimal places
implied no complacency about the permanence of existing theories,
but rather a genuine appreciation of such work as an important aid
to communication in science and to the technical mastery of nature.
Another example is the theory of errors, developed by astronomers so
that they would know more precisely how to interpret other observers'
measurements. They worked tirelessly to establish objective criteria-
that is, quantitative rules-for admitting and rejecting observations,
for correcting the discrepancies due to the different "personal equa-
tions" of observers, for reducing inconsistent observations to a best
value, and for estimating the range of probable error around this best
value (Swijtink 1987). The vast expansion of mathematical statistics in
many of the sciences during this century attests to the same impulse.
Analysis of variance, regression, factor analysis, and other statisti-
cal methods have become standard tools in psychology, sociology, bi-
ology, economics, and other fields for "measuring" entities and effects
and for assessing "objectively" the "significance" of experimental re-
sults (Gigerenzer, Swijtink, Porter, Daston, Kruger, and Beatty 1989;
McCloskey 1985). Of course, the language of calculation is far from
transparent. It provides nothing like a window into the mind of the
creative scientist. But this, far from being a fatal drawback, is a con-
siderable asset if science is to claim general validity. A rigid quanti-
tative form makes knowledge more readily interpretable by diverse
readers precisely because it is silent on many points. The language of
mathematics makes reasoning clearer in part because it has no way
of expressing the tangled, implicit reasoning and ineffable judgments
that guided the work in the first place.
Karl Pearson, whose work as a mathematical statistician around the
turn of the present century was indispensable in forming this mathe-
matical tool for general use, also provides a useful perspective from
which to view these developments. He identified objectivity as the de-
cisive virtue of science from a social standpoint. Pearson was himself
an avowed socialist, by which he meant that society is more important
than the individuals who make it up. An integrated, planned society
and economy cannot depend on mere opinion or arbitrary judgment
to establish the basis for belief and action. One needs instead im-
personal knowledge, knowledge uncorrupted by personal biases and

parochial interests. Science, he argued, fills this crucial role. It is
inherently social knowledge, meaning that the idiosyncrasies of the
various scientists somehow disappear from their collective product.
Advance along the research frontier implies an ever larger terrain
of uncontested order, upon which consensus prevails (Pearson 1892).
The appeal of consensus is very largely responsible for the attractive-
ness of the scientific model to many who are in the business of making
social knowledge (Porter 1990). Such consensus need not imply a deep
harmony of purposes and beliefs. It may be enough that people are
able to coordinate their activities together.
That the natural sciences enjoy some privileged access to truth is
now widely contested. A broad movement, involving philosophers,
sociologists, historians, and literary scholars, now seeks to relate the
content of science to its institutional forms and social context, or to
show that it is closely tied to a style of rhetoric. Almost all such work
purports to deflate the pretensions of science, but this does not ex-
clude holding science up as a model of intellectual endeavor. Richard
Rorty, for example, regards the scientific tradition as an admirable one
precisely because it relies on rational discussion, rather than force or
violence, as its means of persuasion (Rorty 1987). His point is, on the
whole, well taken. We might, of course, object that scientists have not
been shy about making use of access to political power, when they
have had it, to promote their own research agendas and even to stifle
others' (Fox 1974). Or, more seriously, the scientific paper is scarcely
designed to lay bare the researcher's doubts about the results and con-
clusions. Rather, it is constructed according to an almost canonical
style, intended to imply adherence to a rigorous, formal method-
precisely what the pragmatist Rorty rightly denies (cf. Schuster and
Yeo 1986). The idea of scientific method is allied to the ideal of pub-
lic knowledge. The scientists' faith in method supports a presumption
that knowledge is impersonal and can readily be shared and advanced
within a research community. This faith in the transparency and uni-
versality of knowledge helps to explain why scientists are so reluctant
to admit that they too make use of rhetoric. Paradoxically, the re-
markable ability of scientists to create public knowledge, and to gain
almost universal assent, is linked to the anti-rhetorical perspective that
typifies their outlook.
Quantification as a Public Rhetoric

Pearson's philosophy and Pearson's statistics call our attention to an
aspect of the scientific enterprise that has attracted but little interest
and yet is crucial to understanding the force of scientific argument in
public discussion and controversy. Scientific methods are valued be-
cause they can make a reasonable claim to impartiality, even when

their results might not be accepted as valid or true. By this observation
is intended nothing like a wholesale critique of the methods of mod-
ern science, nor even a patronizing anthropological view of them as
appropriate, perhaps, for societies like ours. Here I wish only to recall
Kuhn's observation that scientists normally proceed by tackling prob-
lems that show a good prospect of being solved by using available tools
and theories. Predictions are tested against the artificial world of ex-
periment and only rarely against mere observation. Even within that
world, scientific knowledge depends to a degree on the achievement
of consensus through what is generally called "negotiation" about
meaning. Outside it, the problems become much more severe, partly
because these negotiations may no longer be limited to disciplinary
specialists, but partly also because the objects in question cannot so
easily be manipulated or detached from their complexities in the
interest of experimental control. When confronted with problems of
urgent social or political interest, scientists can often contribute, but
almost never can they generalize unproblematically. Public knowledge
must be supplemented by personal judgment.
Often, however, it is precisely to avoid the arbitrariness of judgment
that an appeal has been made to science in the first place. Science, like
justice, is supposed to be blind. This blindness is the best guarantee of
impartiality and an important meaning of objectivity. From this stand-
point, scientific objectivity is rather like judicial objectivity. Both are
rightly esteemed as mechanisms by which controversies can be settled
without direct recourse to force and violence. The comparison with
law, however, points to differences as well as similarities. Although
judges in most modern societies are supposed to combine objectivity
with legal expertise, these two attributes are separable. Impartiality
carries weight even when not linked to special knowledge. The holy
men of late antiquity portrayed by Peter Brown seem to have been
trusted to settle disputes rather more because of their isolation, and
hence disinterestedness, than because of any special access to truth
implied by their holiness (Brown 1982). Sancho Panza is a fine literary
example of the authority of impartiality even without formal exper-
tise, though his was obviously bolstered by native wit and by the office
of governor. Objectivity in the sense of impartiality provides the main
claim of juries to judicial authority. For scientists, in contrast, impar-
tiality and expert knowledge are inseparable. The best guarantee of
their objectivity is that they have done no more than apply established
general principles to a particular case, perhaps to carry out a familiar
calculation, using known formulas and numbers derived empirically.
In science, as in jurisprudence, the rule of law is essential.
The characteristic judicial form of objectivity, depending mainly on
fair-mindedness rather than rigorous method, has certain limitations

different from those of science. Judges and juries are most easily pre-
sumed objective when they are called to give a decision in a private
dispute between individuals. Their claim to impartiality does not rest
on superhuman integrity, but mainly on having no stake in the out-
come of the case before them. This requires, above all, that there be
no bribes, and that the judge have no connection with either party. In
the Anglo-American judicial tradition, where scientific experts appear
on behalf of one or the other party, their personal objectivity is nearly
always suspect, though the objectivity of science itself is almost never
questioned (Smith and Wynne 1989). Where large interests or broad
policies are at stake, the personal objectivity of judges, too, is inevitably
in doubt. Moreover, much of the public's business, including most de-
cisions involving government expenditures, is not determined by law.
Where the laws of courts are silent, the laws of science are often invited
to speak, and their support is especially needed because state finan-
cial dealings with private businesses invite suspicion of favoritism or
corruption. These, then, are situations in which science and especially
quantification stand almost without rival as claimants to objectivity.
Scientific experts answer accusations of arbitrariness by pointing to
their reliance on impersonal standards. Science claims unblemished
character, not for the individuals who make it, but for the knowledge
that results. It helps if the spokesmen for science seem disinterested,
but they should also appear as unimaginative as possible in their ap-
plication of the facts or methods of science to the particular case. The
rhetoric of science is persuasive in large part because that knowledge
is assumed not to depend on the fallible individuals who constitute the
scientific community.
Generally, one supposes that this is because the content of science is
somehow dictated by nature rather than by men and that it embodies
truth rather than mere opinion. Truth claims, however, may be less
essential than is widely supposed, particularly when science is invoked
to address matters of political and economic interest. The "objectivity"
of science may sometimes mean little more than its fairness. What as-
sures fairness is the existence of a process for reaching decisions that
is mechanical or, at least, ostensibly so. Here is another meaning of
objectivity, one immortalized by such entities as "objective" measures
of intelligence or aptitude. Purely mechanical measures and decisions
seem fair because they stand outside private interests.
This sense of objectivity-reliance on impersonal standards-might
be taken as an attribute of any kind of formal scientific knowledge. In
practice, however, it is associated most closely with the use of numbers.
There are two good reasons for this. First, the methods of processing
and analyzing numerical information are well developed and often al-
most completely explicit. Once one has the numbers, results can in-
deed be generated by mechanical methods, as the preeminent role
of computers in analyzing numbers in our own day attests.2 Faith in
the mechanical character of numerical operations is related to the an-
cient idea that mathematics yields perfect certainty, which is largely
responsible for the enormous and long-standing prestige of mathe-
matics. The second reason for the importance of quantification in
generating objective public knowledge is the vast range and flexibility
of the quantitative methods available. This point needs to be qualified.
Those methods were not given by God, nor, on the whole, are they
accidental by-products of pure scientific research. In fact, the main
reason that so powerful an array of methods has been developed is
that they do such valuable work in generating impersonal knowledge.
Still, numbers are more like a language than the subject of a distinct
science. There are few, if any, subjects that cannot be studied quan-
titatively. Scholars in many fields may feel that numerical approaches
simply evade the deep and important questions. Often, though, an
objective answer is more valued than a profound one.
Indeed, the enormous expansion of quantification in the last two
centuries must be understood partly as a response to the growing
demand for the appearance, at least, of objectivity in the dual sense
of fairness and impersonality. That it is only an appearance is now
widely, and perhaps too sweepingly, argued by scholars in studies of
science (Albury 1983). The political usefulness of objectivity, how-
ever, continues almost unabated, despite this widespread skepticism.
Its appeal reflects the very particular circumstances and political cul-
tures of the contemporary period. Even descriptive statistics, which
are not my main subject here, are collected and used in ways that
reflect the political tradition. Where effective power is local, there is
often little interest in aggregate numbers and sometimes, as when
feudal seigneurs felt themselves challenged by centralizing monarchs,
real aversion to them. Absolutist old-regime states generally regarded
population figures as state secrets, as indeed has the Soviet Union,
though somewhat less so of late. Nineteenth-century statisticians were
correct to insist that the growth of their science reflected an increased
sense of responsibility to the public (Chevalier 1860). The prolifera-
tion of numbers after about 1820 in enquetes, parliamentary reports,
and the like contributed enormously to the vast modern extension of
the range of state power, but it was associated also with a belief that
the public should be kept informed and even a need to justify action
or inaction to that public.
2. Even computers, however, cannot always reliably replicate the same results, not
only because researchers must usually adjust the raw data, but also due to slight
differences in software (see Mirowski and Sklivas 1989).
This association with a liberal polity is all the more characteristic of

the highly ambitious quantitative efforts with which I am concerned
here. The drive by economists and other social quantifiers to reduce
important decisions to the comparison of two or more numbers is
often denounced as technocratic, but this is misleading. One does,
admittedly, often find antidemocratic intentions among the most fer-
vent quantifiers. Their desire to reduce public choices to calculation
embodies an attempt to avoid the irrationality and unpredictability of
participatory democracy, to place decisions instead in the hands of
experts. What critics of quantifrenia usually fail to recognize, how-
ever, is that this is a movement born of weakness rather than strength.
Secure elites, even technocratic ones, do not voluntarily subject them-
selves to the rigidity of a purely mathematical decision-making pro-
cess. Frederic Le Play was probably at least partly correct when he
suggested that the governing classes, where such elites are to be found,
had only a modest need of statistics at all. He argued that familiarity
with statistics was not crucial in states with a hereditary aristocracy,
whose members were raised to govern and did so almost by instinct.
But, he continued, once people who have no practical experience in
public affairs can rise to high office, knowledge of statistics may be the
best available substitute for broad practical experience (Le Play 1885).
Elaborate methods of processing data and generating decisions were
little needed in traditional hierarchical states. Elites, almost by defini-
tion, are brought up to trust their judgment, and everyone active in
political life knows that some important considerations will inevitably
elude precise quantification. Of course, the intuitively or politically
desirable result can often be produced mechanically by altering a few
assumptions. But if the result is known in advance, the calculation can
only be performed for public relations. And to rely on quantitative
procedures is to conduct one's business in a glass house. If, as I argue
here, the key purpose of calculation is to expound and justify choices,
rather than to make them, a closed elite is unlikely to have much use
for it. Science, especially quantitative science, has instead been in-
voked when those making decisions face the potential wrath of power-
ful outside forces. This is now rather common, and the bureaucratic
urge to avoid responsibility has been notoriously present in states
ruled by the Communist party. But where there is little political open-
ness, there is also little opportunity or need to draw on formal, ratio-
nalized models as a basis for decision-making rules. Hence the quan-
tification of public life has reached its most highly developed form
under the political pressures characteristic of modern democracy.
Measuring the Utility of Public Works

In the extreme case, a quantitative methodology for reaching decisions
may be specified by law. Something like this is true of the procedures
for approving new drugs and certain categories of public works in the
United States, which, since the war, has undoubtedly nourished the
greatest efflorescence of practical quantification ever seen. In previous
centuries, quantification rarely had a prescribed role within govern-
ments. More typically, it was advocated as part of a bid for influence
by a few scientists who saw themselves as standing for reason against
arbitrary power. The eighteenth-century project of Condorcet and
others to calculate, using mathematical probability, the reliability of
juries and the trustworthiness of testimonies is characteristic, both in
the extravagance of its ambitions and its futility (Daston 1988). The
only real hope that such calculations would be put to work was that
a truly enlightened monarch might ascend the throne. Somehow, this
never happened. Ambitions like Condorcet's could not begin to meet
with success until they gained the support of powerful institutions.
Thus, the growth of bureaucracy was almost a prerequisite to the
quantification of public life. This is very nearly true even of descrip-
tive statistics, which began to flourish in the most advanced states
of Europe and North America only in the nineteenth century. For
bureaucrats and legislators concerned with crime, education, public
health, factory labor, poverty, and a host of other conditions that
were coming to be known as "social" problems, numbers provided
indispensable information that often was not accessible through per-
sonal observation. Further, a considerable bureaucratic effort was re-
quired to collect and process the data. Because administrators could
define the categories into which people, events, and activities were sub-
divided, they played a large role in determining how these numbers
would eventually be interpreted (Scott 1988). To label them simply
"descriptive" is thus a bit misleading, but that is characteristic of the
rhetoric of statistics that grew up in the nineteenth century. Thomas
Gradgrind in Hard Times called them simply facts. Numerical facts
were valued as a way of enlisting public support and justifying gov-
ernmental action (Porter 1986).
The more ambitious calculations with which I am mainly concerned
here were not so well suited for direct public consumption. The num-
ber of murders recorded in Belgium or the value of cotton textiles
exported from Britain to India was more easily regarded as an un-
problematical fact than was a measure of the public utility of a canal
or rail line. Such recondite calculations could only become instru-
ments of power within the administrative apparatus of the state. We
must not, however, view their more technical character as an argu-
ment against understanding them in terms of their social uses. To the
contrary, their meaning was almost exclusively public and rhetorical,
in contrast to descriptive statistics, whose information content came
to be regarded as invaluable even for decisions that could be shielded
from public view. The uses of calculation were simply different from
those of statistical description. Their purpose, on the whole, was not to

generate public interest or outrage. They were not calculated to excite
the public, but to satisfy it that the relevant authorities were acting
responsibly. Their value was greatest for defensive purposes, as evi-
dence that a bureaucratic agency stood aloof from petty politics and
corruption, serving instead the higher interest of raison d'etat or the
public good. Calculation also had uses within the bureaucracy because
it aided communication and hence observance of the organization's
own rules. Rule-boundedness too, however, is a kind of bureaucratic
rationality, one that reflects a certain defensiveness against the sover-
eign public.
Bureaucratic growth and administrative centralization were precon-
ditions to the quantification of public life. Openness to public scrutiny
or supervision by higher political authorities was crucial in stimulat-
ing the development of a rhetoric stressing numbers and objectivity.
It is, however, misleading to treat the problem of public quantifica-
tion strictly from the standpoint of social demand. The subject has a
technical history too, one that is far more than a pale reflection of its
social history. For those who live in the late twentieth century, it is easy
to take the mathematical methods for granted. Quantifiers are now so
numerous, and their tools so flexible, that they are readily available as
hired guns to anyone and for almost any purpose. Most of their meth-
ods, though, are products of this century. In a world without statistical
consultants and econometric experts, the urge to cloak decisions in ob-
jectivity could scarcely begin to become a concrete program of public
quantification unless the capacity to create new quantitative methods
was commanded by the bureaucracy itself.
These special circumstances did obtain in a few branches of nine-
teenth-century French administration, largely as a result of the enor-
mous prestige of that great school of mathematics and engineering,
the Ecole Polytechnique. In the state engineering corps (the Corps
des Ponts et Chaussees), in particular, the highest mathematical skills
could be taken for granted. Beginning soon after the French Revolu-
tion, members of the Corps des Ponts were recruited exclusively from
among the top graduates of Polytechnique. These were the first engi-
neers to study mathematics as an integral part of their instruction,
and mathematics, as much as anything else, set them apart from their
rivals, entrepreneurial builders of railroads and bridges (Kranakis
1989). Mathematics was the special language of French engineers, a
language that was credible to the public but not, on the whole, com-
prehensible to it. It was thus an invaluable resource for fending off
potential controversy.
The primary appeal of calculation in regard to decisions was to
make those decisions appear routine, almost automatic. It suggested
that public choices were not merely a matter of the play of inter-
ests and were free from the taint of corruption. Servants of a higher
logic, engineers would be responsible to the public and yet gain some
protection from political pressures. Their reliance on numbers was
encouraged, in a way, by the French government, which required a
"declaration of public utility" before the right of eminent domain
could be used to secure land for highways, canals, and railroads. Still,
it was the choice of the engineers to interpret public utility increasingly
in terms of numbers and calculation. This was a way of responding
to the reasonable demand that the public interest be served without
encouraging the corps' business to become a matter of public debate.
Quantification implied that these matters were mainly the concern of
an authorized corps of specialists and outside the competence of the
citizenry. This is at least partly in contrast to the more descriptive aims
of public statistics, which could be seen as bound up with liberalism
mainly because they exposed both the grounds and the consequences
of state activity to public view. Calculation provided evidence that a
corps like the Ponts et Chaussees was acting in the public interest, but
did not go very far towards empowering the general public to assess
and criticize corps decisions.
Neither, however, was calculation the only, or even the most effec-
tive, way to exclude the public. The normal processes of French bu-
reaucracy shielded it far more completely from the public gaze than
quantification ever could. The French bureaucratic ideal ascribed to
each functionary his function, stipulating that nobody was more quali-
fied than he to perform that function or to judge it (Chardon 1908,
1912). Administrative practice, if anything, made functionaries even
less responsible to the public, and several commentators have sug-
gested that such offices continued to be held almost as private prop-
erty, passed down from father to son, even into the twentieth century
(Sharp 1931; Legendre 1968; Hoffmann 1963). Where such condi-
tions prevailed, there was no reason to justify choices with fancy cal-
culations. Numbers became indispensable precisely when public inter-
est, or public suspicion, was too much aroused for the administration
simply to make decisions on its own authority.
Public works, especially canals and railroads, were systematically
subject to public scrutiny in nineteenth-century France. Any major
project required authorization of funds by the parliament (Chardon
1904; Weiss 1989). Even minor ones had to pass through political au-
thorities, the prefects. State engineers, then, could not escape politics.
Politics required each deputy to get his own departement linked up to
the network of canals or railroads. Members of the Corps des Ponts
could not help but be alert to this dimension of the engineer's craft.
They also, however, had a sense of themselves as professional elites.
Mere political convenience was no way to run a distinguished state

corps. Fortunately, the French state licensed a rhetoric favoring ab-
stract rationality over the play of interests with its formal endorsement
of the language of public utility in decisions about public works.
The extra-political authority of quantification, then, was sanctioned
in some degree by the political system itself. State engineers were
not slow to recognize this. As early as 1819, the Council of the Ecole
Polytechnique called for engineers to be adept in what it called arith-
metique sociale. Our engineers "must be able to evaluate the utility or
inconvenience, whether local or general, of each enterprise; they must
consequently have true and precise knowledge of such investments.
They must, that is, be informed . . . of all that can help them appreci-
ate the probable benefits and costs of all these enterprises" (quoted in
Fourcy 1987 [1837]: 350 [translation mine]). The drive to put numbers
to the utility and inconvenience of public works began in 1832 with a
paper by the distinguished state engineer, L. M. H. Navier (Ekelund
and Hebert 1978). Navier had the genius to recognize a natural har-
mony between the ideal of state service-itself very much a political
plus-and the rhetoric of quantification, suggesting disinterestedness
as well as expertise. There is, he argued, a crucial difference between
the British, who idealize the market, and the French, whose engineers
are dedicated to the public good. Being capitalists, the British will
only construct works that will pay. British roads and canals, then, can-
not be the source of prosperity for a region; they will only be built
in areas that are already wealthy enough to guarantee a profit to the
venture. A state corps like the Ponts et Chaussees, in contrast, stands
above the selfishness and subjectivity of the individual entrepreneur.
It is, in a sense, disinterested because it represents the public inter-
est. It can take account of benefits that are not immediately realizable
as increased revenue. It can, for example, construct public works in
anticipation of growth, thus initiating the increase of wealth rather
than waiting for it. French engineers were in the habit of building for
the long run, even for the indefinitely long run, sometimes in pointed
defiance of market incentives (Smith 1990). Their preferred forms
of quantification attested to their objectivity, not only in the sense of
fairness, but also of indifference to all parochial and subjective con-
siderations, such as times, places, and persons.
A justification for projects requiring state subsidies was not wholly
dependent on speculations about the future spread of prosperity. A
consideration of externalities (as they have come to be called) could
provide adequate reason to undertake many projects that failed the
entrepreneurial test of profitability. To establish the point, Navier fur-
nished a calculation. A canal, he observed, requires about 700,000
francs in construction costs per league. This is equivalent to an annual
interest charge of 35,000 francs per league, at five percent. Mainte-

nance and administration demand an additional 10,000 francs per
league per year. Now, the difference between the cost of transport on
canals and that on roads for a ton of merchandise is .87 francs per
league. It is easy, then, to calculate that the canal is worth building if
52,000 tons (that is, 45,000 francs divided by .87 francs per ton) are
transported over it each year. Navier readily conceded that if a toll
of .87 francs per ton were charged, much of the traffic would leave
the canals on account of their slowness and return to the roads. But
market behavior would not challenge a truth of calculation. It only
demonstrates that private enterprise is often shortsighted and need
guidance from the more enlightened. This, in turn, points to the bene
fits of entrusting the canals to the state rather than to profit-seekin
builders. The state can absorb the costs of construction and thus assure
that the maximum benefit is realized from the canal (Navier 1832).
Navier's argument became, for a time, the standard wisdom of the
Corps des Ponts. G.-E. Comoy argued in 1847 that tolls on canals
should be set low enough for the canals to be fully used, for only in
this way could they contribute maximally to the public fortune. Like
Navier, he held that the advantage to the community of a canal is
proportional to the tonnage transported. He also tried to use statis-
tics and calculation to determine at what toll any given canal would
be used to its full capacity, and to plan canals with a capacity suitable
for the country through which they pass. In every case, canals were to
be evaluated for their contribution to the public welfare, not for the
revenue they could bring in, and for that reason he warmly defended
the proposition that the state should build and operate them (Comoy
1847). Another engineer, Laurent Doyat, questioned whether railway
prices should be set to recoup the investment. Even more than Navier,
he thoroughly distrusted the market. We must ask, he insisted, "if the
prices are useful to society." If the cost of rail transport exceeds that
of road transport, traffic may be diverted to the roads, for savings of
time are often too little appreciated by the market (Navier, defending
public canals, had made just the opposite argument). So, in the public
interest, rail prices should always be set lower than the corresponding
cost of road transport. "The advantages that society, commerce, and
industry will derive from railroads will increase with the lowering of
their rates, and will be still greater if the price of transport for travelers
and merchandise is reduced further" (Doyat 1846: 129 [translation
mine]). Only one investor, of course, could operate railroads on these
most desirable principles: the state.
One Ponts-et-Chaussees engineer, Charles Joseph Minard, went so
far as to quantify the injurious effects of railroad competition. He cal-
culated that having two railroads in Paris caused a greater net loss
of wealth than the entire cost of the cheaper one. Such superfluity
should be avoided, it seemed clear. This, Minard argued, was part of
the engineer's responsibility, and quantification was the appropriate
tool for making decisions. For every project, one ought to "evaluate, in
money terms, the utility of the [proposed] construction, and to com-
pare it . . . with the costs" (Minard [1850], quoted in Ekelund and
Hebert 1978: 648).
The skeptical modern reader may detect a curious coincidence of
interests between the general public and the Corps des Ponts et Chaus-
sees itself. But since the French rail system came to be built mainly
with private funds (Doukas 1976), state engineers could not remain
wholly aloof from the more parochial considerations of revenue. From
the 1840s and 1850s, their standard forms of quantification were in-
creasingly respectful of market incentives. They commonly held that
the public utility could not be maximized by building lines requiring
massive public subsidies. Minard, for example, challenged the gen-
erous measure of benefits implied by Navier's formula. The reason
that some traffic on a canal drops out when a high price is charged,
he observed, is precisely that the benefit of the canal to that traffic
is less than the price. This objection was made more pointedly by
Jules Dupuit, who introduced into the debate considerations involv-
ing what would later become known as marginal utility. He argued,
against Navier, that the utility to be derived from an object, or from
transportation on a road, canal, or railroad, is not a fixed property of
the good or service itself but a quantity that varies, depending on the
circumstances of each user. Some individuals are willing to pay an ex-
tremely high price for the convenience and speed of a railway journey
because they derive a corresponding benefit from it; others may not
use the railroads unless transport on them is almost free. In conse-
quence, the only coherent way to represent the demand for a good or
service is as a schedule, or function, of price. At very high prices, the
demand will be small. At low prices, it may be very great. The utility of
a public work is the sum of the (very different) utilities derived from it
by all users, whose behavior is assumed to be rational given the prices
they face. Dupuit's strategy for quantification, in short, was designed
to summarize the values of the market, not to judge the market against
an external standard (Dupuit 1844; see also Etner 1987).
Dupuit's methods led to considerably lower measures of the utility
of public works than Navier's. This in itself was not altogether to the
liking of his colleagues in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees. Still more
threatening was his attempt to bring utility into the realm of observ-
able economic quantities. State engineers had taken it for granted that
their concerns were higher than those of mere capitalists, who were
interested only in revenue, while they themselves were concerned with
public utility. Dupuit argued that, through a system of differential

prices, utility and revenue could be made commensurable, if not pre-
cisely equal. A militant laissez-faire liberal, he proposed that each unit
of traffic should be charged in proportion to the benefit it realized
from the canal or railroad. Using this system, every public work whose
utility exceeded its costs could be made to pay for itself. The only good
reason for the state to be involved in canal and railroad construction
at all was the skill and experience of its engineers.
The tradition of practical quantification in French engineering
proved robust enough to incorporate Dupuit's conception of utility,
provided it was recognized that no system of differential tariffs could
in real life come close to bringing in revenue sufficient to match the
full utility of a project. By the late nineteenth century, discussion of
the rational quantitative basis for deciding whether to build a rail-
road, and especially for determining what prices should be charged,
had become quite intricate and detailed (Colson 1910). The prevail-
ing methods for estimating a project's utility or of determining these
optimal prices were a somewhat eclectic mix. The engineer was re-
quired first to separate frais from peages, that is, costs from tolls. It
was hard to agree on just what the costs of transport were, but almost
everyone conceded that these should be recovered from users. This
charge came to be known as the prix de revient partiel. The quantitative
methods for assessing it came from Belgium-which, not coinciden-
tally, was the first country to fully nationalize its rail system. They
were described in great detail, in an exhaustive study of the Belgian
rail system's accounts for calendar year 1844, by an engineer in the
Belgian Ponts et Chaussees, Alphonse Belpaire (Belpaire 1847).
Dupuit's ideas had a considerable influence on determining the best
system for allocating tolls (peages). His arguments implied that these
should be charged in proportion to benefit received, not to cost in-
curred. But the highest authority on the economics of transport in the
late nineteenth century, Clement-Leon Colson, made it very clear that
this benefit could not be individually estimated for each shipment.
Fixed rules must govern all charges to freight; there could be no room
for mere judgment in the administration of railroads. Here is another
sense in which objectivity was crucial to state enterprise (see Etner
1987). Economic quantification, after all, served mainly as an alter-
native to market mechanisms. Purely private railroads could operate
according to a simpler principle, one that required experience and
entrepreneurial judgment rather than formal quantitative principles.
Under free enterprise, one charges what the market will bear. The
state, in contrast, was obliged also to take into account what system of
(monopoly) charges would be most just and (perhaps irreconcilably)
what system would permit the railroad or canal to contribute a maxi-
mum of utility to the public. Such aims put engineers of the Ponts et
Chaussees in the business of quantifying something much more elu-
sive than revenue in order to maximize some combination of utility
and fairness.
By the 1850s, at least, a quantitative comparison of costs and bene-

fits had come to be used routinely by French engineers in the planning
of railroads and other public works. Similar techniques were applied
from the 1870s to regulate the tariffs for freight and passengers that
the private companies would be permitted to charge. French engi-
neers, in short, went a long way towards accepting quantitative ob-
jectivity as a standard for public policy. But it should be clear that
objectivity did not imply a disregard for all values. The transition from
Navier to Dupuit shows that values were very much at issue in dis-
cussions of the proper form of quantification, and that they were to
some degree in flux. The point is that, once these values were more
or less settled, it became possible to reduce greatly the play of sub-
jectivity in recommendations about the construction and pricing of
individual public works. The standardization of methods of analysis
was inseparable from a standardization of values, and the achievement
of objectivity depended on both.
Quantification and Political Culture
In the twentieth century, graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique have

come to be held responsible for a strong technocratic impulse in
French economic planning. There is some truth to this, but only if we
define our terms rather carefully. A French technocrat is by no means
a "mere" technician. In some ways, the spirit of French technocracy
is precisely opposed to the quantifying impulse discussed here. It is
a grave error to reduce the power of technocrats to the authority of
objectivity. We need to ask why members of the elite corps of state
engineers were willing to subordinate their judgment to the results of
a mechanical calculation.
The Ecole Polytechnique has long educated engineers, but we can-
not identify it with, say, the Ecoles dArts et Metiers, which accepte
even students from modest backgrounds and gave them the trainin
by which they could enter the new trade of engineering (Day 1987). A
most from the beginning (1794), students at the Ecole Polytechniqu
were not taught about nuts and bolts-nor about gravel and pavin
stones-but received a high-class scientific education. Already under
Napoleon, Latin was required on the entrance examination, and
1816 literary study was added to the curriculum. In 1819, the school
Council described it as a place to give old elites the knowledge that
meritocratic society requires: "We live in a time when the tranquilit
of the state can only be assured through the instruction of the super
classes. It permits them to obtain, through personal superiority of

virtue and enlightenment, the influence they must exercise over others
for the security of all. It is a happy necessity, if one thinks of it with an
elevated spirit, that requires rank to be justified by merit, and wealth
by talent and virtue" (quoted in Fourcy 1987 [1837]: 351 [translation
mine]). The mathematics taught at the Ecole Polytechnique and at
the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees was certainly intended to have some
relevance to engineering (Picon 1989). Especially in regard to eco-
nomics, French engineers were almost exclusively interested in what
could readily be applied to practical problems (Dumez 1985; Zylber-
berg 1990). But the curriculum also placed a considerable premium
on what was analytically powerful and mathematically interesting. It
was to be far enough above mere practice to be suitable for the forma-
tion of an elite. One of the roles of mathematics at Polytechnique was
rather like that at nineteenth-century Cambridge University, where
engineering applications were simply irrelevant.
Under the July monarchy, entrance requirements were reformed
in the direction of a classical education. John Weiss argues that the
increasing prominence of the classical baccalaureat es lettres in prepa-
ration for various professions, including Polytechnique engineers, re-
flected a deliberate policy of the state to restore hierarchy to French
society (Weiss 1984). By the Third Republic, the Ecole Polytechnique
was recruiting from a slightly wider range of backgrounds, but a lycee
education was still almost indispensable for gaining entrance. More
important, perhaps, was the ethos of the school itself. The small but,
by late in the century, growing fraction of students who were not social
elites when they entered certainly learned to think of themselves as
such by the time they left.
This sense of themselves was not based on their craft or skills as
engineers, nor on their ability to use special techniques of higher
mathematics. Colson, who taught economics at the Ecole des Ponts et
Chaussees from 1892 to 1932 and who was influential in debates about
the curriculum at Polytechnique, argued forcefully that technicians
are not enough for society. Rather, it needs leaders. They must possess
not merely mathematical and scientific knowledge, but also a certain
"instinct," difficult to define but intimately linked to culture and its
antique roots (Shinn 1980). Ezra Suleiman shows to what extent this
spirit had come to prevail by the postwar period. Elites educated at the
Ecole Polytechnique, he observes, believe firmly, "much as the British
civil service has believed since its creation, that a general preparation
for leadership positions is the most desirable" (Suleiman 1978). Their
own skills, they report, as if with one voice, are sufficiently general-
ized that they can move easily from one sector to another. Not wholly
atypical is Roger Martin, president of a large industrial firm, who told
an audience of Polytechnicians that his education there, and most par-

ticularly his training in mathematics, was quite useless to him. Others
might counter that mastery of mathematics is an important element
of mental training and of that "polyvalence" in which Polytechnicians
have taken such pride. It is, in any event, not technical education but
general culture that Polytechnicians identify as their principal qualifi-
cation for positions of leadership in French government and industry.
Such is the self-image of the leaders of French "technocracy." Per-
haps there is some basis for calling them technocrats because of their
habitual commitment to efficiency and economic expansion. Their
claim to authority, however, is not so different from that of traditional
elites-Suleiman's comparison with the higher civil service in England
seems apposite (see MacLeod 1988). Although they value accurate
statistics, as do most managers, they show very little inclination to re-
duce decisions to a mechanical operation on numbers. Rather, they
trust their instincts.
One needs, then, to distinguish sharply between technocracy and

the mania for quantification. Numbers are not simply the instrument
of a technocratic disdain for democracy. Rather, they are a tribute
to democracy, an appeal to objectivity made necessary because the
authority one commands on account of position or personal qualifica-
tions is insufficient. In France, this was rarely so, at least up to the Sec-
ond World War. The elite was sufficiently secure, and the bureaucracy
sufficiently closed, that decisions rarely had to be justified to a broader
public (Kuisel 1981; Brun 1985). The effort to quantify the utility of
public works is thus the exception rather than the rule, a reflection
not mainly of a mathematical obsession among French engineers, but
rather of their inability to gain full control over such highly controver-
sial decisions as the location and pricing of public works. Even so, their
credibility depended as much on their social and bureaucratic status
as on the impersonality and objectivity of their methods. Nineteenth-
century French engineers did not aspire to a decision-making proce-
dure as mechanical as that favored by many in the postwar United
States. The quantitative economic methods of French engineers were
never very rigid and were far from being fully standardized. They
did not sacrifice the privilege of exercising judgment beyond what
their political exposure demanded. Practical quantification was not for
them mainly an aid to private decisions, but a deeply public act. Their
reliance on it demonstrates that expertise, and even the recondite
mathematical methods to which it has recourse with increasing regu-
larity, cannot be understood in terms of technique alone, but reflect
the embeddedness of science in culture.
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Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers

Author(s): Theodore M. Porter

Objectivity and Science

Bacon's maxim is most often taken to refer to the scientific basis

Other sociological studies of experiments, too (though perhaps not

personal knowledge, knowledge uncorrupted by personal biases and

Quantification as a Public Rhetoric

cause they can make a reasonable claim to impartiality, even when

fair-mindedness rather than rigorous method, has certain limitations

This association with a liberal polity is all the more characteristic of

Measuring the Utility of Public Works

those of statistical description. Their purpose, on the whole, was not to

Mere political convenience was no way to run a distinguished state

interest charge of 35,000 francs per league, at five percent. Mainte-

public utility. Dupuit argued that, through a system of differential

By the 1850s, at least, a quantitative comparison of costs and bene-

Quantification and Political Culture

In the twentieth century, graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique have

classes. It permits them to obtain, through personal superiority of

an audience of Polytechnicians that his education there, and most par-

One needs, then, to distinguish sharply between technocracy and

Science, edited by R. Olby, G. Cantor, J. Christie, and M. Hodge, 1024-43

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