Quantitative Methods in Intellectual studies Chapitre d’ouvrage - 2023

Quantitative methods enable departing from the view of intellectuals as isolated and socially unattached. One of the functions of statistics is in fact to generalize observations made at an individual level to a macrosocial level, thus underscoring the profoundly social nature of an intellectual vocation. Statistics are a means to go beyond individual contingencies and offer a more relational or structural view of the intellectual world. They serve to identify the various groups that constitute this social space in the short and the long run. The role of statistics is therefore not to replace qualitative methods or situated texts, but to inform intellectual practice at another level.