Political Arithmetic

A Symposium of Population Studies

Lancelot Hogben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136521560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Encompassing the areas of economics, sociology, social biology and genetics, and drawing on studies from the UK and Australia, this volume charts and analyses the factors affecting population growth. Chapters include:
* The international decline in fertility
* The changing structure of the family
* Educational opportunities
* Concepts of race.

PART I

THE SURVIVAL MINIMUM

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

PROLEGOMENA TO POLITICAL ARITHMETIC

by
LANCELOT HOGBEN

THE study of population is the only branch of social research with its own logical technique for the detection and co-ordination of factual data. This is not surprising when we recall the circumstances of its origin. The men who brought it into being were actively associated with the group which laid the foundations of the British empirical tradition of naturalistic inquiry. Some little-known information about the three founders of British demography—Graunt, Petty, and Hailey—is given in a later chapter by Dr. Kuczynski. The social context which brought them together is a theme worthy of more comment. A brief account of their relations to the intellectual life of their time suggests a fitting introduction to the investigations which follow.

The names of all three are found in the original list of Fellows of the Royal Society when it received its charter in 1662. The “ingenious author of the Bills of Mortality” referred to in Sprat’s History was of course John Graunt, the first writer on vital statistics. The first life table—that of Hailey—was published in the Philosophical Transactions of 1693. Hailey’s position in the world of natural science is made memorable by the comet which bears his name. The presence of Graunt and of Petty, author of the Politicall Arithmitick, demand an explanation. Especially is this true of Petty. Petty is sometimes claimed as an economist. The association of economics with science jars harshly on the modern ear.

The issue of the Lansdowne Collection of unpublished fragments (1927) has thrown new light on the intellectual outlook of Petty. “By turns cabin boy, hawker of sham jewellery, seaman, inventor, physician, Fellow and Vice-Principal of Brasenose, Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, and of Music at Gresham College, Surveyor, Member of Parliament, landed proprietor, philosopher, statistician and political economist,” the author of the Politicall Arithmitick was in short a man of affairs. What is less known about him is that some of the earliest meetings, perhaps the first, of the “Invisible Colledge” met in Petty’s rooms at Oxford.¹ The group so called included besides Boyle and Petty, Christopher Wren, Bishop Wilkins, Seth Ward the astronomer, and later Hooke. It was the parent body of the Royal Society, and Petty may justly rank with “the father of chemistry and the uncle of the Earl of Cork” as one of its co-founders.

Two circumstances conspired to encourage fruitful collaboration between men who, like Graunt and Petty, were pioneers of realistic social inquiry with men who, like Hooke and Newton, made Britain supreme in the domain of natural science. In the Century of Inventions² leaders of theoretical science were in close touch with inventors, sea captains, surveyors, and architects. They were acutely interested in the material forces propitious to the advancement of scientific knowledge or otherwise. They were equally alive to the ideological obstacles which hindered the progress of discovery. In active revolt against the scholastic tradition of the universities the Invisible College had begun its informal sessions within a decade of the death of Galileo. Less than half a century had elapsed since the Parliament of Paris—so Voltaire tells us—enacted a law by which the chemists of the Sorbonne must conform to the teachings of Aristotle on pain of death and confiscation of goods. Shortly after Newton’s death Voltaire wrote that Descartes “quitta la France parce qu’il cherchait la vérité qu’était persecutée alors par la misérable philosophie de V école” Newton “a vécu honoré de ses compatriotes et a été enterré comme un roi qui aurait fait du bien a ses sujets . . . heureux et honoré dans sa patrie. Son grand bonheur a été non seulement d’être né dans un pays libre mais dans un temps où les impertinences scolastiques étant bannies la raison seule était cultivée.”

Close association of scientific theory and social practice is a feature of the “adventurous hopefulness” of early English capitalism, sufficiently documented by Hessen in his essay on the Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia, in Professor G. N. Clark’s recent lectures, and in the Preface of the new volume of Hooke’s Diaries edited by Robinson and Adam. The founders of the Invisible College were among the earliest apostles of the social creed of nineteenth-century capitalism. In his own words, Boyle’s gospel was that “the goods of mankind may be much increased by the naturalist’s insight into the trades.” In a letter to a friend named Marcombes he says:

The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy, the mechanics and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical colledge that values no knowledge but as it hath a tendency to use. And therefore I shall make it one of our suits to you that you should take the pains to enquire a little more thoroughly into the ways of husbandry . . . which will make you extremely welcome to our invisible colledge.

In tracing the origins of the Invisible College during the years which immediately preceded the first revolution of Stuart times, Sprat remarks:

I shall only mention one great man who had the true imagination of the whole Extent of this Enterprise as it is now set on foot, and that is the Lord Bacon in whose books there are everywhere scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the Defence of experimental philosophy, and the best Directions that are needful to promote it.

Bacon’s defence of experimental philosophy is now a well-thumbed brief. One of his directions to promote it is forgotten, though “adorned with so much art” as Sprat appraised. It would be hard to find a better statement of what Hessen calls the unity of theory and practice than the passage which opens with the following words in the Novum Organum:

The roads to human power and to human knowledge lie close together, and are nearly the same; nevertheless, on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of dwelling on abstractions, it is safer to begin and raise the sciences from those foundations which have relation to practice and let the active part be as the seal which prints and determines the contemplative counterpart.

In this spirit the Royal Society began its labours.

They design [Sprat tells us] the multiplying and beautifying of the mechanick arts. . . . They intend the perfection of graving, statuary, limning, coining and all the works of smiths in iron or steel or silver. . . . They purpose the trial of all manner of operations by Fire. . . . They resolve to restore, to enlarge, to examine Physick. . . . They have bestowed much consideration on the propagation of Fruits and trees. . . . They have principally consulted the Advancement of Navigation. . . . They have employed much Time in examining the Fabrick of Ships, the forms of their sails, the shapes of their keels, the sorts of Timber, the planting of Fir, the bettering of pitch and Tar and Tackling.

The design included a conspectus of all the principal technological problems which affected British mercantile supremacy and the theoretical issue relevant to their solution. Of all these “histories” the most illuminating compilation is the Heads of Enquiries into the state of British Agriculture. Twenty-six major questionnaires were printed that they might be “the more universally known” and that persons skilful in husbandry might be “publickly invited to impart their knowledge herein for the common benefit of the country.” The topics included “the several kinds of the soyls of England” (sandy, gravelly, stony, clayie, chalky, light mould, heathy, marish, boggy, fenny or cold weeping ground), when each was “employed for arable” ; “what peculiar preparations are made use of to these soyls for each kind of grain, with what kind of manure they are prepared ; when, how and in what quantity the manure is laid on” ; “what kinds of ploughs are used” ; “the kinds of grain or seed usual in England” ; “how each of these is prepared for sowing,” “there being many sorts of wheat . . . and so of oats . . . which of these grow in your county and in what soyl, and which of them thrive best there . . .”; “how they differ in goodness”; “what kinds of grain are most proper to succeed there”; “some of the common accidents and diseases befalling corn in the growth of it, being blasting, mildew, smut, what are conceived to be the causes thereof and what the remedies” ; “annoyances the growing corn is subjected to, as weeds, worms, flies, birds, mice, moles, etc., how they are remedied” ; “waies of preserving the several sorts of grain” ; “how the above-mentioned sorts of soyl are prepared when they are used for Pasture or Meadow” ; “the common annoyances of these pasture and meadow grounds.”

Such are samples of the questions. The replies to them were placed after discussion in the archives from which they have been lately rescued by Lennard, who analyses them in an article in the Economic History Review (iv, 1932). Here deliberately and systematically organized science takes stock of the common experience of mankind to formulate problems for which precise solutions are now available. Truly “a brave attempt to link up book learning and scientific research with the experience of practical farmers” as Lennard says. We may go further and say that it is the first comprehensive vision of a rationally planned ecology of mankind.

The direct affiliations of the Invisible College with sociological inquiries are less well known. Sprat gives an eloquent list of the “qualities which they have principally required in those whom they admitted.” First he insists on freedom for different schools of religion or philosophical persuasion. “This they were obliged to do or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they openly profess not to lay the Foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish or Protestant philosophy, but a philosophy of mankind.” Nationality was to be no barrier. “By this means they will be able to settle a constant intelligence throughout all civil nations and make th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Part I The Survival Minimum
• Part II The Recruitment of Social Personnel