Geschichte und Statistik

This file contains a single-author methodological essay in statistical theory and Staatswissenschaft. Inama-Sternegg’s scope is conceptual, archival, and institutional: he asks how statistics relates to history, why modern official statistics must become historical-comparative, and which public bodies should do that work. He begins from the old dispute over whether statistics is a science, a method, or merely administrative description, but refuses to reopen it abstractly. The practice of modern statistical offices has already shown that statistics concerns exact observation of social mass phenomena; the remaining question is how such observation becomes scientific.

Für nichts mehr als das erste vorbereitende Stadium gilt uns diese Arbeit.

English translation: We regard this work as nothing more than a first preparatory stage.

The central thesis is that the present is only the point of departure. A social condition cannot be explained by its immediate surroundings alone, because it is mostly the accumulated result of earlier social forces. Statistical knowledge therefore requires developmental series: population increase, mortality, prices, crime, schooling, housing, wages, and moral-statistical relations must be traced backward if causal regularities are to be grasped.

Denn jeder Zustand ist zum kleinen Teile nur ein Produkt gerade der ihn umgebenden gleichzeitigen Verhältnisse; zum weitaus größeren Teile ist er eine Äußerung des Gesamtlebens und Wirkens der gesellschaftlichen Kräfte einer früheren Zeit.

English translation: For every condition is only in small part a product of the contemporary circumstances surrounding it; in far larger part it is an expression of the total life and workings of the social forces of an earlier age.

This is the essay’s defining conceptual move: statistics becomes historical not by narrating recent events, but by reconstructing measurable processes of development through exact mass observation.

So ist die Statistik mit Notwendigkeit zu einer historischen Disziplin geworden, nicht im Sinne einer eigentümlichen Art der Darstellung der neuesten Geschichte, wie man wohl gemeint hat, sondern im Sinne einer pragmatischen Darlegung des Entwicklungsganges, welcher zu den gegenwärtigen Verhältnissen und Zuständen des Gesellschaftslebens geführt hat, mit den spezifischen Mitteln der Quantitätsbestimmung und der exakten, d. h. alle konkurrierenden Umstände vollständig und gleichmäßig berücksichtigenden Massenbeobachtung, in letzter Linie, in ihrer höchsten Ausbildung die Lehre von den Gesetzen der Evolution des gesellschaftlichen Geistes der Menschheit, soweit er sich offenbart in messbaren Massenerscheinungen.

English translation: Statistics has thus of necessity become a historical discipline—not in the sense of a peculiar mode of presenting the most recent history, as has sometimes been supposed, but in the sense of a pragmatic exposition of the course of development which has led to the present conditions and states of social life, employing the specific means of quantitative determination and of exact mass observation (i.e. one that takes account fully and evenly of all concurrent circumstances); ultimately, in its highest development, it is the science of the laws of the evolution of the social spirit of humankind, insofar as that spirit reveals itself in measurable mass phenomena.

The essay then surveys the sources and obstacles of such a programme. Continuous registers are superior to isolated censuses or enquêtes because they secure comparability and duration: civil-status registers, church books, land books, guild rolls, price lists, wage accounts, transport records, school statistics, crime records, and suicide data can extend statistical vision into earlier centuries. Inama-Sternegg is aware of the problems—estimates, rounded numbers, changing classifications, and missing contextual knowledge—but he treats them as matters for criticism and historical interpretation, not as reasons for abandonment. Older categories must be understood in their own social setting, while modern material may sometimes be regrouped for comparison.

The institutional argument is equally important. Private scholars and university specialists should reconstruct scattered individual evidence, but official statistical central bureaus must exploit already registered mass materials. They alone possess the authority, staff, access to public records, and administrative network required. Yet their work must be scientific, not merely clerical.

Wer die Zahlen zum Sprechen bringen will, muß selbst ihre Sprache verstehen; wie aber die Sprache der abgeklärteste Ausdruck der Ideen ist, welche in einem Volke leben, so ist die Sprache der Zahlen des Volkslebens nur dem verständlich, der dieses Volksleben selbst versteht.

English translation: Whoever would make the numbers speak must himself understand their language; but just as language is the most refined expression of the ideas that live in a people, so the language of the numbers of a people's life is intelligible only to him who himself understands that people's life.

The relevance of historical statistics is political as well as scholarly. It gives administration long developmental tendencies in place of short impressions, guiding population policy, price and wage questions, legal values, salaries, infrastructure, and reform. For Inama-Sternegg, legitimate state action is historically informed action.

So ist jede Staatsaktion Verwirklichung einer erkannten historischen Entwicklungstendenz und gerade als solche allein gerechtfertigt.

English translation: Thus every action of the State is the realization of a recognized historical tendency of development, and only as such is it justified.

The closing programme calls on governments to preserve registers, inventories, Urbarien, and land books; to catalogue and inspect them through central statistical offices; and to extract their contents steadily with state and academic support. The essay’s lasting significance lies in its fusion of historical method, quantitative mass observation, and bureaucratic infrastructure: statistics becomes a science of social development precisely by becoming historical.