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Classical Probability in the Enlightenment

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The word 'page-turner' doesn't automatically come to mind when the subject is the history of some branch of mathematics, particularly if you are, like me, not a mathematician. Yet I found Lorraine Daston's book compulsively readable. She covers a period from about 1650 and 1840 when the basic principles and applications of the theory of probability were being discovered. While its disoverers came up with many ideas that we still regard as valid today, they also had many ideas that seem pretty crazy. It was widely believed, for example, that the probability calculus could be used to compute guilt or innocence in criminal cases.
The author explains this paradox by showing that the great probabilists of this shared the idea that there was such a thing as a rational person (they would have said 'rational man') and that it is possible to know what this rational person is like. They defined probability as rational expectation and defined rational expectation as the beliefs of a rational person.
By the 1840', it was recognized that the idea of a rational person was not an adequate foundation for the theory of probability. Probability was redefined as being either the frequency with which events occur or the subjective level of confidence that people have that an event will occur where this level of confidence has no rational foundation.
The book ends with the discrediting of the interpretation of probability as rational expectation. But this idea has undergone a revival in the last 20 years (the Bayesian revolution). That story would make an interesting sequel to the events described in the book.