Mathis Bertrand

Thesis Project

Statistical Optimism: Birth, Appropriation, and Criticisms of a Framework of Thought in France and Germany (1876-1918)

A first form of this project has been presented under the joint supervision of Éric Brian^† and Laurent Mazliak.
Admissible to doctoral contracts of the "History and Civilizations" doctoral school of EHESS, June 2025. Funding not obtained.
Thesis project currently seeking funding (doctoral scholarship, ANR, ERC...).

My research focuses on what I call statistical optimism: a vision partly developed by Adolphe Quetelet in which the law of large numbers not only describes society, but reveals an underlying stable, positive and moral order. This optimism manifests itself in epistemological confidence in the average and in the establishment of calculation institutions at the European level.

Contrary to traditional descriptions of ‘statistical fatalism’, I analyse the evolution of this legacy between 1876 and 1918, through three major themes:

• Quetelet's social ontology: I examine how Quetelet merged astronomy and morality to establish the ‘average man’ as the measure of the general good. This project, rooted in a Leibnizian and rationalist heritage, spanned the century until Paul Lazarsfeld's work, despite early criticism.
• A contrasting European reception: While Belgium institutionalised the model, France (through the Paris Statistical Society and the positivists) and Germany (e.g. Wilhelm Lexis and Moritz Drobisch in texts that have not yet been translated) ardently debated its validity. This section questions the persistence of statistical optimism after the death of its founder.
• Sociological criticism: The analysis focuses on the break made by Durkheim, Halbwachs, Simmel and other ‘neo-Kantian’ thinkers. By detaching the norm from simple mathematical frequency to make it an external social constraint, they redefine the nature of chance and contingency.

The work concludes with the First World War, a turning point where the experience of industrial and military contingency shattered the original statistical enthusiasm and the Laplacian model that supported it.

Publications

• October 2023 Review of Anthologie de la calculabilité : naissance et développements de la théorie de la calculabilité des années 1920 à 1970, Michel Bourdeau and Jean Mosconi (eds.), Cassini, 2022. In Revue de Synthèse, vol. 144, no. 3-4 (2023), p. 423–437. [PDF]

Translations & Sources

• Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1867), La Statistique morale et le libre-arbitre humain (Die moralische Statistik und die menschliche Willensfreiheit). Unpublished French translation and notes. Working version (January 2026). [PDF] [Original text (1867)^*]
  ^* PDF file optimized to facilitate on-screen reading.

Communications & Talks

• January 30, 2026 « A logician in moral statistics: Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch’s Die moralische Statistik und die menschliche Willensfreiheit (1867) »
  Online Presentation at Pr. Ingolf Max’s Oberseminar, University of Leipzig. (Link available upon request)
• November 19, 2025 « The ‘Society of Mathematicians’ in Maurice Halbwachs: The Memory of Scientific Activity between Analysis and Synthesis »
  Talk at the 35th Novembertagung on the History & Philosophy of Mathematics, Nancy, France. [Slides]
• March 28, 2025 « Statistics as a tool of sociological invention in Maurice Halbwachs: from the critique of the average to a discourse on sociological method? »
  Talk at the Seminar on the History of Probability and Statistics (EHESS), Aubervilliers, France. [Slides revised and enriched for online reading]
• April 20, 2023 « Reason as calculation : from the Euclidian ratio to the ideal of a universal characteristic »
  Informal talk at the seminar of Giovanna Cifoletti (EHESS), Paris, France. [Material]

Research Identifiers