ABSTRACT

Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.

摘要

关于政治算术史的学术研究强调了它对古典自由主义的重要性，古典自由主义是一种政治哲学，其中主体将自己视为社会抽象系统中的自主个体。在统计学的发展、公共测量空间的出现和概率计算的帮助下，这个社会及其组成部分在大量的印刷数字中变得可理解和可管理。我们的建议是，这种政治算术的类别、数字和规范已经在无处不在的个性化文化中发生了变化。我们认为，今天的政治算术产生了一种不同类型的社会，Facebook 首席执行官马克·扎克伯格称之为“默认社会”。我们将这种新的社会视为一个“模糊的整体”，并提出它的特点是连续的存在、同时性的当代形式或在一起的方式，本尼迪克特·安德森认为这是任何一种想象的社区的基础。就像早期算术中想象的社会一样，这个模糊的整体是一个抽象概念，模糊了分层和歧视的形式。