In an address to the national parliament in 1999, Nelson Mandela voiced an old cliché, a deep truth from both the heart of modernism and the fraught history of numbers in South Africa. “Figures,� he said, “are meaningless in the context of people’s concrete experiences.�1 But, in the contemporary world, the opposite may be true: figures render large abstractions concretely meaningful to personal experience, speaking with authority about the connection of human beings to otherwise incomprehensible phenomena. Being assertions of the real, they fill the space between the unknowable and the axiomatic, imagination and anxiety. Viewed thus, the statistic is a medium of communication and a species of commodified knowledge, one whose value and veracity accumulates as it circulates. Part fetish, it has also become a term in the ordinary language of being.

The rise of contemporary Western perceptions of society, Ian Hacking (1990: 1 – 5) has famously argued, was closely tied to the “avalanche of numbers� produced, publicized, and deployed for purposes of governance by nineteenth-century states (cf. Canguilhem 1989). The obsession with counting and with calculating probability, he suggests, had profound epistemic effects. For one thing, “society� itself “became statistical.� For another, the appeal to lawlike regularities began to replace other kinds of causal explanation, such as “human nature,� in making sense of and acting upon the world. Which, in turn, made rates of “deviancy� — of criminality, suicide, madness, illness — especially salient. To wit, post-Enlightenment ideas of the social, the moral, the normal, and the rational owe a lot to the crime statistic, a fact made evident in the actuarial underpinnings of a lot of early detective fiction. Take, for example, Edgar Allen Poe, a fine organic anthropologist with an explicit interest in the “public mind.� In common with many writers of good mysteries, Mark Seltzer (2004: 561) observes, Poe often invoked numbers in the interests of sociological realism; for him, “the death of God� left us with mathematics, “the death of Satan� with forensics. The Victorian impetus to quantify deviance, in both realist fiction and social science, presupposed a rulegoverned social order whose positive outlines were most visible in the negative, in lawlessness and vice. It was these “social pathologies� that would become the urgent object of sociology and social engineering (cf. Hacking 1990: 118). So much for Euromodernity, in which, from the first, the very idea of governance depended on statistics, the “science of [a] state� (Rose and Miller 1992: 185). Wherein lies the significance of crime statistics at the dawn of the twenty first century? How do they figure, so to speak, in an age in which foundational assumptions about society, citizenship, and order are called into question, in which social engineering is ever more suspect, in which the discourse of deviance is deeply discredited, in which government and public alike appear more concerned with personal security, suffering, rights, and risk than with social pathology — and in which the ontological status of the state itself is a matter of argument?