Deringer argues that our modern quantitative age characterized by facts, figures, and calculations began in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was well established in Great Britain by the late eighteenth century. Before 1688, the use of data and calculations was marginal; it had little impact on thinking about anything. A century later, the authority of numbers and calculations became an accepted feature of discussions about almost everything.
Was the triumph of quantitative analysis a product of the so-called scientific revolution or of the eighteenth-century enlightenment? Deringer barely discusses these possible explanations. Instead, he focuses on great political debates in Parliament and the pamphlet literature at the time, which increasingly resorted to numbers and calculations to score debating points.
Far from using data and calculations to get at the truth, as in “numbers don’t lie,” eighteenth-century calculators used them as arguments to advance particular politico-economic stances and policies....