Utopia and Cataclysm: The Sciences of Prediction and the League of Nations

National statistical agencies institutionalized the collection and publication of data, as well as its representation in increasingly sophisticated models, in the early 20th century. These new kinds of knowledge came to define modern quantitative social science. With them, researchers hoped to measure, predict, and control mass societal phenomena, such as economic depression and epidemic disease. Scholars have typically recounted this history in national terms – that is, as a history of how governmental statisticians established the nation-state as a unit of analysis and as an object of social science. This panel, by contrast, examines this history’s international dimensions, concentrating on research conducted at the League of Nations. The scientific projects that the panelists will discuss were truly global collaborations requiring extensive institutional resources and diplomatic finesse. The League’s research continued to influence international organizations after the Second World War. Heidi Tworek will present on the League’s public-health research and epidemiological surveillance. Laetitia Lenel’s and Max Ehrenfreund’s papers will examine the political environments and intellectual contexts in which the League’s business-cycle forecasting developed in the 1920’s and the 1930’s, respectively. Erwin Dekker will discuss the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and his colleagues at the League. These papers by four researchers representing universities in four different countries show how an ideology of internationalism informed the League’s projects. This ideology was one of the purest examples of a high-modernist vision of a planned, rational society, the kind of vision that was essential to the development of the sciences of prediction.