Creating the Social Question: Imagining Society in Statistics and Political Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Denmark
Authors
Anne Løkke
Abstract
Practices such as surveys, guided by scientific statistics and the discourse of political
economy, were indispensable tools in the construction of “the social” as a field
in Denmark in the late nineteenth century. Leading Danish statisticians were able to
create new representations of the structures of society that could be accepted as
truth by conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike. Two episodes serve as examples
for close examination: the establishment of the “workers’ question” as a social
problem in the 1870s, and the new categorization of death in infancy as a social
problem around 1900.
