In the previous chapters we have outlined how biological sciences have historically offered, and continue to promise, new means by which the State can attempt to render the behaviours and frailties of its citizens tractable. As Hacking indicates above, this transformation also needed statistics and maths. It needed quantity. In 1815, Paris had more suicide than London – a phenomenon thus in need of an explanation. A preoccupation with moral degeneracy had led to the collection of thousands of statistics on suicide in France which spawned Durkheim's painstaking sociology on the matter. Statistics need categories: one cannot measure something without a name. Social engineering is made possible by counting the bits of society we don't want or which offend our sensibilities, and imagining technologies for their amelioration. Hacking (1990) describes how two uses of the concept of ‘normal’ emerge from the 19th century onwards.

‘Normal’ is a crucial concept in shifting the emphasis from ‘is’ to ‘ought’: utopian projects need both kinds of normal, in particular to effect the augmentative shift from the typical to the perfectible ideal. As we anticipated in the previous chapter, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the rise of ‘prevention science’. Uniting both versions of ‘normal’ within the grand project of human improvement, the paradigm seeks to ensure people achieve normalcy by intervening to stop damage in its tracks, and also to ensure optimal human flourishing. Prevention science could build better people.