I absolutely love Ian Hacking’s work. He takes the best parts of Michel Foucault and the best parts of analytical philosophy and mashes it up into something truly brilliant, clarifying, and wise. For example, his Historical Ontology is the closest thing I’ve found to a methods text for the kind of dissertation I am writing. The most recent issue of History of the Human Sciences contains a lengthy interview with Hacking (on the occasion of his winning a prize in 2009) that covers the full arc of his career: from early research on the emergence of probability as a style of reasoning, to his contemporary projects on mental illness and “the looping effects of human kinds.” The interview is a nice introduction, if you are unfamiliar with his work, and a delightful refresher if you’re already a fan. There’s also a great deal about his relationship to the work of Foucault, and why he identifies as a philosopher but not a historian. Below are a few choice quotes.

Here, Hacking summarizes his first two major books on the history of probability and statistics:

MSØ: But, could you say something about what you think happens in the history of sta- tistics in the 17th, 18th centuries that perhaps is of relevance for today’s thinking.

H: It is not so much about today’s thinking about statistics, it’s more about how we came to live in a universe of chance in which we think of everything in terms of probabilities. The newspapers are constantly concerned with probabilities of sport, equally of sex; everybody reads stories about the risks of various diseases. When a new building is to be put up on the hill here, there will be an environmental protection report which will discuss use-risk analysis and decision theory. We think, in physics that quantum phenomena are essentially indeterministic. In most studies of the human genome, and of what it teaches about illness and ancestry, what we get are probabilities. We live in that world of chance. There was no such world in the 17th century. I’m interested in how that complete change in our conception of the universe and ourselves came into being. I tried to tell the first part of that story in The Emergence of Probability (1975a), and to tell the second part in The Taming of Chance (1990).
…
The ‘moral scientists’ of the 19th century attended to the enormous amount of varia- tion between people. But, it’s not just variation: they found that there are regularities in this variation. They became convinced that there is a Gaussian curve for any particular attribute of humanity, whether it is the length of the male arm, or the speed with which men can run – or (they used to say) the extent to which people feel morally responsible. Thus it is no longer the Human, it is instead the average man with a statistical dispersion. Then comes the idea that it is important to normalize people. For instance, that the psychiatric patient is a deviation from the norm, who will be cured by normalization. The goal of medicine, and the goal of much else that is connected with people, is to try to make us normal. That’s a very different conception of being human from the Enlightenment one.

MSØ: Yes, so the whole idea of normality in that sense is a pretty recent invention?

H: Well, in my scale of ‘recent’, yes. But for most young people today, recent is at most 6 years ago, and that’s the end of recent.

Here, Hacking emphasizes a frequent distinction that he makes between categories, names, “kinds” that are potentially looping or interactive (because the objects named might care about the names in question) with those that are not:

When we discover a new kind of beetle, or a new kind of mineral, or a new kind of subatomic particle, we classify it in a new way, but our classification does not interact with the insect or rock we have identified. We tend to think that recognizing a new kind of person is very much the same. To use your loaded example, which by now has been too overworked for me to want to return to the subject, it was thought perverts were just there to identify; they were a kind of person that medicine got round to recognizing, and then the law got round to punishing. But kinds of people are not like kinds of beetle. In the case of ‘perverts’ we have a striking example of a relatively recent phenomenon, of how a ‘kind’ of person can take control of the ‘kind’ and redefine it both in theory and in action. Homosexuals have taken control of a classification originally introduced by medicine and the law. That is one of the things that Gay Pride is all about.

Finally, here’s a quote about Hacking’s conflicted, but mostly appreciative, relationship with Foucault:

Yes, we found problems with Foucault’s citations. I have always been pretty lenient about this, because I think that the main thrust of his analysis is correct. I give examples of his errors, and explain my willingness to be generous about them, in a little squib I wrote much later, ‘Night Thoughts on Philology’, reprinted in my Historical Ontology [2004c].
At the time I was trying to write a book explaining Foucault to an English-language readership which, in 1976, had not yet taken to his work. I became increasingly dissatisfied with what I was writing. Finally I decided I had to stop. So one day I took the entire manuscript, at least 200 pages of self-typed material, and fed it into the large dustbin in the Stanford quad outside the philosophy department. A number of grad. students watched in glee – one joked that each student present should salvage a chapter and use it for his PhD thesis.

Føllesdal recalls that I also tore up some small part of the book earlier, in his presence, right after one of our classes had met. Doubtless at that moment I was moved by dissatisfaction with Foucault, but I destroyed the whole typescript because I was dissatisfied with myself. I came to the conclusion that Foucault is the man to read about Foucault. There are now a hundred books about Foucault, and I still think Foucault is the only one to read.

Bonus: In answering the last question, Hacking reveals his love of Scandinavian crime fiction, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo!

An idle Sunday afternoon thought: In historical work, we frequently come upon things that almost happened. That is to say, of the set of all things that did not happen, some seem much more plausible than others. We see traces in the archives of an idea that was never publicly stated, a speech that was written but not delivered, a movement that almost got off the ground but couldn’t find quite enough funding, or lost a key organizer. And so on. On some level, I think we privilege these “almost happened” events over those that are much more implausible. Why?

I think the answer has something in common with “regression discontinuity designs.” I’m no expert on RDDs, but the basic idea is quite simple: if there is some meaningful cutoff between two groups, then it makes sense to compare cases that are quite close to the cutoff to try to estimate the effect of being selected into the group. For example, if students are selected for special education based on their scores on a standardized IQ test, we can compare students just below and just above the threshold to see if being placed in the classes has a significant change on the outcome (on the assumption that there is very little different between students with, say, an IQ of 79 and 81 beyond their placement in the class).

Historical counterfactuals based on events that “almost happened” seem somewhat analogous. We can’t actually get data on the outcome of interest – in historical analysis, we almost never have many cases that differ only along one variable – but we can at least reasonably speculate (“simulate”?), how would this small change have affected a later event? By restricting ourselves to events that almost happened, we try to get at the importance of an event somewhat separated from all the other contingent factors surrounding it. In other words, if we can say “if this small and random event had occurred, X and not Y would have occurred at time 1, and that small change would plausibly have had a big consequence at time 2” then we are making a case for the importance of event Y.

A bit less abstractly, I’ll give an example from my own work. I study the history of national income statistics (GNP, GDP, etc.). In the early period of official national income statistics (the 1920s-1940s), lots of authors debated precisely what to include in the statistics and how to include different goods, services, intangibles, etc. Eventually, most of these debates were settled into the modern standards (the UN System of National Accounts being a key document), and some debates were re-opened in the 1970s. Two of the most criticized omissions were unpaid housework (cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. primarily performed by women) and the environment (the value of clean air, water, and so on).

What’s interesting from this perspective is that women’s work was “almost” included in the accounts in the 1920s-1930s, while the environment was nowhere to be found. In prominent texts (a 1921 NBER report, the first official Department of Commerce statistics in 1934, etc.), women’s work was discussed, and estimates were even produced (but not included in the final totals). No such estimates existed for the environment. And so, in some sense, it becomes much more plausible to ask, what would have happened if early national income statisticians had included women’s work? How important was this omission? How much would development economics have changed (say)? Or, how much would this inclusion have delegitimized the statistics? Asking those questions of the environment requires a much bigger leap – we have to change more things at the beginning of the story, because no one in 1921 or 1934 was pushing for their inclusion, and no estimates were made that could simply have been added to the final totals.

In some sense, this whole post is getting at similar issues to those discussed in Emigh’s methodological work on “Negative Case Methodology” – trying to answer questions of the form, “Why didn’t X occur?” E.g. why is there no large, visible social movement around finance in the United States?* For Emigh (if I’m remembering correctly), studying the “almost happened” gives us leverage on understanding why an outcome did not obtain. We study the small movements that did form but failed to get traction in order to understand the forces that prevented a larger movement from emerging. My discussion above flips Emigh: instead of focusing on the “almost happened” to figure out why it was “almost,” I want to ask, “What difference would it have made it if had happened?”

Enough of that. Back to the books.

* Greta Krippner’s new, and not yet published work, addresses this question.

In conjunction with my research on the history of macroeconomic statistics, I’ve been poking through New York Times articles from the early 20th century. I came across an absolute gem from Jan. 24, 1932 that I had to share with you, my loyal readers. It’s a story about a speech given by Yale Professor, Jerome Davis*. Here are some choice bits:

“We have an industrial autocracy in the United States now just as real as the autocracy exercised by the late Czar over his subjects… The fact is that Americans haven’t begun yet to realize what it’s all about – that an industrial revolution or transformation has changed this nation into an urbanized one, a mechanized one, where fewer than 200 corporations out of 200,000 control half the wealth of the country. The result is that we’ve lost our liberty and freedom of action without realizing that we have drifted into a state where power is predominant.”

I wonder if Prof. Davis had read Berle and Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property (published the same year as the speech), or perhaps an earlier article. I think they would have gotten along rather well!

Prof. Davis went on to list a new “decalogue of social principles”. Some are fairly unobjectionable – freedom of speech and the like. Here are a few more interesting ones:

4 – A planned social and economic order for the benefit of all.
5 – Common ownership of what we use in common, such as roads, &c.. eventually even public utilities.
6 – Distribution of the national income so that all shall share according to their needs and to their ability to serve society.
…
9 – Soul force, not violence – sacrificial mutual action for and with all to be a basic ideal underlying the new order.
10 – Faith in a Father God or spiritual force in the universe.

It’s probably worth mentioning that although Prof. Davis got his PhD in Sociology from Columbia, he was a professor at the Yale Divinity School and was speaking to a conference of progressive churches! A position for which he was apparently denied tenure, due to his being a bit.. well.. communist. Ah, the good old days.

* I wonder if there is any relation to our own Jerry Davis?

As a sociology blog, it seems almost obligatory to have some kind of MLK Day post. Let’s call it a ritual. Thankfully, I have a few links and thoughts to share, including some of my own MLK Day rituals.

First, as I do most MLK days, today I re-listened to and re-read two speeches: “I Have a Dream” and “I Have Been to the Mountaintop”. If you haven’t read or watch them lately, go do so again. The first will remind you why MLK is our holiest civic saint, the second will remind you that sometimes life is better written than any work of fiction – how else could a man have said, on the eve before his death:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

It sends a chill through me every year. Listening to MLK also inspires me to ask of my own life, and my own research, what is this for? Not in the hokey, how do I sell this to the foundations and funding agencies way, but in the deeper sense of how does my work promote justice over injustice, freedom over tyranny, compassion over hatred. It’s a tough question, especially when so much of what I do feels like disconnected intellectual musing. But today’s as good a day as any to ask, why am I here?

Second, on MLK Day I usually recall the other philosophers and thinkers who have influenced me. The last couple years, I’ve thought of Vonnegut. Vonnegut, like myself and the high school I attended, was a humanist. Humanism, for Vonnegut, was a pretty simple proposition:

We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

As a not-religious sociologist, I find Vonnegut’s phrasing a lot closer to my heart (although decidedly less emotionally moving) than MLK’s rhetoric. But the differences pale compared to the similarities.

Lastly, each MLK Day brings new treats in terms of tid-bits about his life and work, or contemporary remixes of rhetorical classics. In the first category, I enjoyed a post by Ari about MLK’s turn towards more radical, less civil rights focused, economic activism (hat tip to Mark Thoma). Quoting at length from a speech MLK gave in Grosse Pointe (a rich suburb not too far from where I grew up), Eri argues that we have mostly forgotten MLK’s support of unions and his sociological analysis of the origins of violence. Here’s one of the excerpts:

“But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Ari goes on to retell how MLK Day became a national holiday, by eventually winning the support of corporations, and then asks:

I wonder what Martin Luther King would think of his eponymous day. Of the MLK lesson plan — long on heroism, patriotism, and feel-good rhetoric but short on violence, non- or otherwise — in my son’s classroom. Of the fact that his holiday’s roots in organized labor have been completely forgotten. Of the painful irony that corporate sponsorship proved key in passing the law marking his birthday.

More than that, I wonder what those sponsors would think if they were transported back to Grosse Pointe, on March 12, 1968, to hear King deliver his “Other America” speech, including the line, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” I suspect they wouldn’t recognize that Dr. King. I wonder how many of us would.

I think that my quote of the day, today, will be “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

Lastly, in the popular remixes vein, my favorite auto-tuning remixers have a new video out:

I hope you enjoy it, and the rest of the day.