Statistical utopianism in the age of aristocratic efficiency

The modern history of science is commonly associated with an inexorable move toward increasing specialization and, perhaps, a proliferation of expert discourses at the expense of public discourse. This paper concerns the standing of science as a basis for public authority in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and suggests that, in relation to the political order, this standing remained tenuous. These themes are exemplified by the career of Karl Pearson, founder of the modern school of mathematical statistics and something of a social visionary. Like Huxley and other scientific naturalists, Pearson wished to incorporate science into a reinvigorated "general culture" and in this way to reshape an elite. Statistics, seemingly the archetypal form of specialist expertise, was conceived as an almost utopian program to advance intelligence and mortality in what he sometimes referred to as a new aristocracy.