The invention of demography and state-building

Abstract

In both the academic and the political sphere, demography is a discipline which enjoys widespread approval. This consensus rests to a great extent on the specific categories employed, namely those applicable to civic status, whose historical conditions of possibility were instituted and consecrated by the state. Demography was always intended to be an instrument of state administration and at the same time, a means of understanding the social world. In order to reveal the mechanisms according to which demographic categories, questions and applications are constituted, the author presents an analysis of the historical relations between the social space where demographic discourse is produced and disseminated and the related spaces, in particular the political-administrative space and the space of associations. These relations are first necessary for a bureaucratic neutrality to be built up, which lends the discipline its authority and seeming objectivity.