Giovanni Botero on the Forces Governing Population Growth

Abstract

Giovanni Botero (1544-1617) is a majorfigure in the early history of modern political science. His principal work, Della ragion di stato (The Reason of State, 1589), is in many ways of comparable interest to Machiavelli's much more famous The Prince (1513). It is a slightly earlier and shorter work of Botero's, Delle cause della grandezza delle citta (The Cause of the Greatness of Cities, 1588), however, that should earn him recognition as the originator of modern population theory. The concluding section (Book III) of that treatise introduces a scheme for analyzing the forces governing population growth that, more than two hundred years later, became known and enormously influential as the centerpiece of Malthus's Essay. As Schumpeter comments in his History of Economic Analysis: Divested of non-essentials, the 'Malthusian' Principle of Population sprang fully developed from the brain of Botero in 158[81: populations tend to increase, beyond any assignable limit, to the full extent made possible by human fecundity (the virtus generativa of the Latin translation); the means of subsistence, on the contrary, and the possibilities of increasing them (the virtus nutritiva) are definitely limited and therefore impose a limit on that increase. And further: [Botero's] path-breaking performance-the only performance in the whole history of the theory of population to deserve any credit at all-came much before the time in which its message could have spread; it was practically lost in the populationist wave of the seventeenth century. But about two hundred years after Botero, Malthus really did no more than repeat it, except that he adopted particular mathematical laws for the operation of the virtus generativa and the virtus nutritiva (pp. 254-255). Despite the distance in time and in some respects in philosophy, the similarity between the thinking of the English clergyman Malthus and his Italian predecessor (who was a Catholic priest trained as a Jesuit) goes beyond the basic framework of their analytic approach. For example, Botero's views on the types and modus operandi of what came to be known as positive checks and ''preventive checks to population growth are a remarkable anticipation of Malthus's treatment. Like Malthus (who did not know the work of his Italian predecessor), Botero sought to ground his reasoning in observable demographic facts, even though that effort was largely frustrated by his lack of access to reliable statistics and by his misconceptions about the demography of both the ancient and the contemporary world. Reproduced below is the full text of Book III of The Cause of the Greatness of Cities as translated into English by Sir T. Hawkins. The text of this translation (published in London in 1635) was obtained from the New York Public Library. It is rendered here in modern spelling and with modern punctuation.