Political Arithmetic's 18th Century Histories: Quantification in Politics, Religion, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

AbstractSeventeenth‐and 18th‐century political arithmetic – the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of quantitative demographic information for various political, economic, scientific, and scholarly purposes – has attracted increasing scholarly attention since the mid‐1990s. Long understood as an early or proto‐social scientific discipline, anticipatory of modern economics and statistical demography, political arithmetic has emerged from recent studies (informed by new approaches to state‐formation, contextual intellectual history, constructivist history of science, and work on biopolitical governmentality) as a more variegated, less straightforwardly modern and, notably, less secular phenomenon. These developments have exposed the teleological nature and other limitations of older disciplinary approaches, but new studies have neither wholly shed nor replaced older definitions of what constituted political arithmetic during the long eighteenth century. This article surveys the state of the field and argues that a comprehensive history of political arithmetic's multiple roles and meanings during the long eighteenth century must take a much wider range of contributors and publics into account.