Lorraine Daston
  |
Lorraine Daston is Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, and the moral authority of nature. Her most recent books are Against Nature (2019), Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023).
Lorraine Daston joins the Paris IAS in November 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
History of probability and statistics; moral authority of nature; objectivity; rules and algorithms; natural disasters; the internationalisation of science.
Why Is Diversity a Value? A History
It is startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly the value of diversity, until a few decades ago a value largely confined to the aesthetic and organic realms, has acquired deep political and moral significance. Diversity as a value has a long history, but not in the moral and political realm. Until the nineteenth century, its home was in aesthetics. The Roman encyclopedist Pliny admired the variety of flowers and gemstones; medieval Christian writers praised the abundance and diversity of God’s creation; Renaissance orators elevated the qualities of copia and varia in speeches; early modern princes vyed with one another to assemble Kunst-und Wunderkammern that showcased the diversity of all the products of art and nature (including the diversity of human beings). In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diversity became associated first with political economy and the principle of the division of labor and then with the specialization of organisms to ecological niches.
Once an aesthetic value of extravagance, diversity mutated into an economic value of efficiency. In the twentieth century, values of biodiversity and cultural diversity became intertwined. All of these past traditions, the aesthetic, the economic, and the biological, are still subliminally present and in part responsible for the recent rise of diversity as a moral and political value. Universalism has become an object of suspicion, either as the interests of a particular privileged group masquerading as the interests of humanity, or as simply a failure to appreciate the riches of diversity. How did this sea change in value come about, and come about so swiftly?
Key publications
Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison. Objectivity, Zone Books, 2007.
Lorraine Daston. Against Nature, MIT Press, 2019.
Lorraine Daston. Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, Princeton University Press, 2023.
|
|
|
|
|
|