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 7,0,1*+,6725< 7+(,1752'8&7,212)*5$3+,&$/$1$/<6,6 ,1 7+&(1785<%5,7,6+(&2120,&6 +DUUR0DDV0DU\60RUJDQ (GLWLRQV6FLHQFHV+XPDLQHV_m5HYXHG +LVWRLUHGHV6FLHQFHV+XPDLQHV} QR_SDJHV ¢  ,661; ,6%1   $UWLFOHGLVSRQLEOHHQOLJQH¢O DGUHVVH  KWWSV ZZZFDLUQLQIRUHYXHKLVWRLUHGHVVFLHQFHVKXPDLQHVSDJH KWP  3RXUFLWHUFHWDUWLFOH  +DUUR0DDV0DU\60RUJDQm7LPLQJ+LVWRU\ 7KH,QWURGXFWLRQRI*UDSKLFDO $QDO\VLVLQ WKFHQWXU\%ULWLVK(FRQRPLFV}5HYXHG +LVWRLUHGHV6FLHQFHV +XPDLQHV QR S  '2, UKVK    'LVWULEXWLRQ«OHFWURQLTXH&DLUQLQIRSRXU(GLWLRQV6FLHQFHV+XPDLQHV k(GLWLRQV6FLHQFHV+XPDLQHV7RXVGURLWVU«VHUY«VSRXUWRXVSD\V /DUHSURGXFWLRQRXUHSU«VHQWDWLRQGHFHWDUWLFOHQRWDPPHQWSDUSKRWRFRSLHQ HVWDXWRULV«HTXHGDQVOHV OLPLWHVGHVFRQGLWLRQVJ«Q«UDOHVG XWLOLVDWLRQGXVLWHRXOHFDV«FK«DQWGHVFRQGLWLRQVJ«Q«UDOHVGHOD OLFHQFHVRXVFULWHSDUYRWUH«WDEOLVVHPHQW7RXWHDXWUHUHSURGXFWLRQRXUHSU«VHQWDWLRQHQWRXWRXSDUWLH VRXVTXHOTXHIRUPHHWGHTXHOTXHPDQLªUHTXHFHVRLWHVWLQWHUGLWHVDXIDFFRUGSU«DODEOHHW«FULWGH O «GLWHXUHQGHKRUVGHVFDVSU«YXVSDUODO«JLVODWLRQHQYLJXHXUHQ)UDQFH,OHVWSU«FLV«TXHVRQVWRFNDJH GDQVXQHEDVHGHGRQQ«HVHVW«JDOHPHQWLQWHUGLW Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 2002, 7, 97-127. Timing History : The Introduction of Graphical Analysis in 19th century British Economics Harro MAAS Mary S. MORGAN Abstract The introduction of time-series graphs into British economics in the 19th century depended on the « timing » of history. This involved reconceptualizing history into events which were both comparable and measurable and standardized by time unit. Yet classical economists in Britain in the early 19th century viewed history as a set of heterogenous and complex events and statistical tables as giving unrelated facts. Both these attitudes had to be broken down before time-series graphs could be brought into use for revealing regularities in economic events by the century's end. Key-words : Time Graphs – History of Statistics – Causation in History – 19th Century British Economics. Résumé : La partition de l'histoire : l’introduction de l’analyse graphique dans l’économie britannique du XIXème siècle L'introduction de graphiques temporels dans la pensée économique britannique du XIXème siècle a été permise par une nouvelle initialisation du temps historique, qui se présente désormais sous la forme d'événements comparables, mesurables, et standardisés. Pourtant, les économistes classiques anglais du début du XIXème siècle percevaient l'histoire de manière très différente, comme un ensemble d'événements hétérogènes et complexes, les statistiques présentant des faits non reliés entre eux. Ces deux idées ont dû être abandonnées pour que les graphiques temporels soient utilisés à la fin du siècle afin de mettre en évidence des régularités à l'œuvre dans les phénomènes économiques. Mots-clés : Graphiques temporels – Histoire de la statistique – Causalité en histoire – Pensée économique anglaise au XIXème siècle. Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines 98 Introduction The second half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of a wealth of new tools and instruments for the analysis of economic phenomena : the calculus, index- numbers, diagrams and graphs. Not all of these new tools were universally acclaimed by economists, but it can hardly be disputed that an economic text from, say, 1920 looks very different from a text of a century earlier. The aim of this paper is to examine the introduction of what is visually the most spectacular new tool – graphs – into British economics. Early use of graphs to display economic data can be found at the end of the 18th century in Germany 1, and by William Playfair in Britain and France in the same period. But these remained exceptions, especially in Britain, for « Englishmen lost sight of William Playfair », to paraphrase one of the later pioneers of the use of graphs in economics, William Stanley Jevons. While graphs became regularly used in the natural sciences from the 1830s onwards, they were still looked upon with distrust by political economists and statisticians, and we see a real explosion of their use only after the 1880s. The Jubilee-issue of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (formerly the London Statistical Society) of 1885 contained substantive contributions on the graphical method, written by the British economist Alfred Marshall and the French statistician Émile Levasseur. In the Palgrave of 1894-1896, John Neville Keynes advocated its usage for inductive arguments in economics and A.W. Flux analysed certain examples. Bowley gave the method a central place in one of the first textbooks in statistical methods of 1901. With Jevons and Bowley, graphs came into their own both as a technique to reveal economic phenomena and as materials upon which to base explanations. Why there was such a gap between Playfair’s introduction of graphs into political economy and Jevons’s full employment of such techniques has been something of a mystery 2. We suggest it has much to do with the attitudes of 19th century British economists in the classical tradition towards both history and statistics. On the one hand, for most of the century, British political economists held statistics in disdain, a disdain evident in their rejection of political arithmetic and so statistical data. In contrast they had a stronger regard for the particularity of events and for history. For political economists in the classical tradition, from Smith to Mill and beyond, economic actions and behaviour, and so their scientific explanation, were located in the motivations and propensities of individuals, understood by introspection and common sense reasoning followed by deduction. History figured as the canvas in which these actions were played out and so the time and space in which the laws of economics might, perhaps, be evidenced. But these laws would rarely be observed directly because of the many other contributing causes which melded together to produce particularity in each historical event. Statistical data on such events would thus reveal nothing but the particularities of history. And even if the laws were occasionally revealed, they would not give access to the motivations which underlay them. For example, Malthus’s ideas about economic motivation could not be drawn 1 Cf. NIKOLOW, 2001. 2 This may have been part of a general reduction in the use of graphs in mid-century Britain, apart from work in tides, but we do not address this issue here. For a recent history of the development of graphs in the nineteenth century, cf. HANKINS, 1999. Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - Universidad de los Andes - - 157.253.50.50 - 31/07/2018 18h22. © Editions Sciences Humaines Harro Maas, Mary S. Morgan 99 out of a set of statistics, and his laws of population could not, he claimed, be seen in the history of a country because so many other factors were at work. So, we argue, before graphs could reveal economic phenomena and feature in economic explanations, British economists had to rethink their position with regard to both history and statistics : specifically, historical events had to be repackaged as data. This change in understanding would have transgressed the traditional boundaries between the moral and natural sciences in the early part of the century, but became unproblematic by the end. A complicating factor is that in so far as time- series of social, or moral, realm data were considered by statisticians (as well as political economists), they too understood these data as the outcomes of complex historical events. These boundaries broke down during the century as economists strove for an apparently unified method of inquiry for the natural and the social sciences and as statisticians in Britain abandoned their self-imposed injunction merely to report facts and moved to using data to make explanations. In the process, multiple causes, which economists and statisticians had understood as contributing causes in the construction of particular historical events came to be seen as disturbing causes to be stripped away for explanatory power. This enabled more straightforward comparisons between economics and the natural sciences and was associated with a statistical analysis of graphic data. These last steps were only taken from Jevons onwards. Thus the introduction of graphs can not be separated from debates on the « true » method of political economy that occurred in Britain throughout the 19th century. Their introduction involved not just a clarification of the role of statistics, but a reinterpretation of the nature of economic events in historical terms. We argue that this interpretative move involved two elements : the standardisation of historical events and what we call the « timing of history », a phrase we discuss in the first following section. We continue with the early rejection of political arithmetic as relevant to political economy by Dugald Stewart and we shortly contrast Stewart’s views with William Playfair’s early use of time-series graphs. Stewart’s classification of the sciences sets the stage for the mid 19th century debates on the method of political economy, in particular between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell, and to the motivations that lay behind the formation of statistical societies in Britain in mid century. All ingredients are then in place to understand how the pioneer of the graphical method in political economy, William Stanley Jevons, initiated the use of graphs in his economic research. We then examine how the graphical method took hold in economics, turning in particular to Marshall’s exposition of the graphical method at the Jubilee meeting of the Royal Statistical Society. uploads/Litterature/ 1-1-3-maas-morgan-2002-timing-history-the-introduction-of-graphical-analysis-in-19th-century-british-economics.pdf

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