Alain Desrosières

About the author

Alain Desrosières (1940–2013) was a French statistician, sociologist, and historian of science whose work fundamentally reframed how public statistics are understood. His landmark 1993 book, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, traced the origins of statistics as administrative machinery in the 19th and 20th centuries and was later translated into English. His distinctive contribution was arguing that statistical categories are constructed realities — neither purely objective facts nor political propaganda — a position made possible by his rare combination of sociological insight and rigorous statistical training.

His collected papers appeared in two volumes in 2008, with a final collection published posthumously in 2014.