Statistics, natural and social order

Abstract

This article talks about the different statistical techniques (counting, mean, standard deviation, normal distribution, regression), that have been developed from the XVII century, with Graunt and Petty, founders of Political Arithmetic and predecessors of present ways of counting the population, thru the end of the XIX century, when Galton and Pearson developed the models that allows to study relationships between variables (correlation and regression). Between both moments we can find Quetelet, someone very relevant as pioneer of statistical modelling, with his «average man», and father of periodical and standardized census. The article not only has a descriptive purpose, but also it pretends to show the circumstances, both of heuristic and soci-political nature, that made possible the invention of the different statistics, at the same time that I show its role in the naturalization of social order, as a previous condition for its acceptance as political order.