Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics

Abstract

T HE POLITICAL ARITHMETIC of John Graunt and William Petty was predicated on nominalist assumptions about the nature and sources of order in both society and the physical world. Where later statisticians routinely presumed that natural and social phenomena were susceptible to quantitative study only because and insofar as they were ordered by inherent causal laws, Graunt and Petty viewed the world as made up of discrete entities with no intrinsic relations obtaining among them. They regarded causal laws as constructs of the human mind, and they conceived the uses of mathematics in terms of creating order rather than discovering its immanent principles. These presuppositions help to fix political arithmetic's place in the spectrum of English thought during the decades immediately after the Restoration, and they also illuminate the changing social and political significance of important nominalist currents in the natural philosophy of the age. Within the framework of seventeenth-century nominalism, the relations between social order and the order of nature, and between natural and social philosophy, could be construed in several ways. Graunt and Petty stated the issue primarily in methodological terms: quantifying is important because it provides a form of knowledge free from the distorting effects of controversy and conflict; and the natural philosophers' primary claim on our attention is that, as a group, they offer an example of how consensus about explanatory principles and concepts makes for social harmony. Underlying this view was a further argument-that the conditions for social order ultimately must be self-imposed by individuals as well as enforced by public authority. Again natural philosophy provides the compelling example. With its conception of knowledge as the product of a sustained application of human reason to the phenomena of the physical world, and with its emphasis on the industriousness and self-discipline required of experimenters and investigators, the new science represented a form of social practice which in itself would make those who took it up virtuous. This line of argument was frequently incorporated into a broader set of claims which Petty and Graunt do not make. Robert Boyle, for example, found it reasonable to combine a nominalist epistemology with the view that the