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Classical Probability in the Enlightenment
Daston's 1988 landmark — the book that established her reputation and traced the Enlightenment invention of mathematical probability as a tool of reasonable judgment rather than as a purely technical theory.
Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988) was the book that established Daston as one of the most important historians of science of her generation. It tells the story of how mathematical probability emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not as an abstract mathematical theory but as a tool for modeling the judgments of the reasonable person — the merchant, the jurist, the natural philosopher — under conditions of uncertainty. The book argues that classical probability was, in its founding intent, a formalization of enlightened judgment rather than a replacement for it, and that its subsequent transformation into a technical discipline removed from practical reasoning represents a specific historical development that could have unfolded differently.
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The book traces the work of Pascal, Fermat, Huygens, Jakob Bernoulli, Condorcet, and Laplace, showing how they developed probability theory in close engagement with practical problems of commerce, law, and natural philosophy. Classical probability