WEBVTT NOTE 10. Mercantilism and Freedom in England from the Tudors to the Civil War (continued) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.320 6. Prophet of Empiricism, Sir Francis Bacon 2 00:00:07.320 --> 00:00:15.560 The status and reputation of Sir Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626, is one of the great puzzles 3 00:00:15.560 --> 00:00:21.720 in the history of social thought. On the one hand, Bacon was universally hailed as the 4 00:00:21.720 --> 00:00:28.600 greatest man of his age. Over a century later in the great manifesto of the French Enlightenment, 5 00:00:28.600 --> 00:00:35.040 and the Encyclopedia, Bacon was hailed extravagantly as the greatest, the most universal and the 6 00:00:35.040 --> 00:00:38.120 most eloquent of philosophers. 7 00:00:38.120 --> 00:00:43.960 Yet what had he actually accomplished to warrant all of the accolades? 8 00:00:43.960 --> 00:00:49.700 This prolific statesman and writer with great fanfare and self-advertisement in a series 9 00:00:49.700 --> 00:00:58.120 of books from the 1600s to the 1620s set forth a series of injunctions about the proper method 10 00:00:58.120 --> 00:01:05.000 of Scientific Inquiry into the World, including Social as well as Natural Sciences. 11 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:12.400 Essentially, Bacon wrote numerous exhortations to everyone else to engage in detailed factual 12 00:01:12.400 --> 00:01:18.760 investigation into all life, all the world, all human history. 13 00:01:18.760 --> 00:01:27.280 Francis Bacon was the prophet of primitive and naive empiricism, the guru of fact-grubbing. 14 00:01:27.280 --> 00:01:34.680 Look at the facts, all the facts, long enough, he opined, and knowledge, including theoretical 15 00:01:34.680 --> 00:01:41.360 knowledge, will rise phoenix-like, self-supporting and self-sustained out of the mountainous 16 00:01:41.360 --> 00:01:44.100 heap of data. 17 00:01:44.100 --> 00:01:50.800 Although he talked impressively about surveying in detail all the facts of human knowledge, 18 00:01:50.800 --> 00:01:55.440 Bacon himself never came close to fulfilling this monstrous task. 19 00:01:55.440 --> 00:02:02.760 Essentially, he was the meta-empiricist, the head coach and cheerleader of fact-grubbing, 20 00:02:02.760 --> 00:02:09.040 exhorting other people to gather all the facts and castigating any alternative method of 21 00:02:09.040 --> 00:02:10.700 knowledge. 22 00:02:10.700 --> 00:02:18.560 He claimed to have invented a new logic, the only correct form of material knowledge, induction, 23 00:02:18.560 --> 00:02:26.100 by which enormous masses of details could somehow form themselves into general truths. 24 00:02:26.100 --> 00:02:29.960 This sort of accomplishment is dubious at best. 25 00:02:29.960 --> 00:02:35.780 Not only was it a prolegomenon to knowledge rather than knowledge itself, it was completely 26 00:02:35.780 --> 00:02:40.240 wrong about how science has ever done its work. 27 00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:46.120 No scientific truths are ever discovered by inchoate fact-digging. 28 00:02:46.120 --> 00:02:53.800 The scientist must first have framed hypotheses. In short, the scientist, before gathering 29 00:02:53.800 --> 00:03:01.480 and collating facts, must have a pretty good idea of what to look for and why. Once in 30 00:03:01.480 --> 00:03:08.640 a while, social scientists get misled by Baconian notions into thinking that their knowledge 31 00:03:08.640 --> 00:03:16.060 is purely factual, without presuppositions and therefore scientific, when what this really 32 00:03:16.060 --> 00:03:22.640 means is that their presuppositions and assumptions remain hidden from view. 33 00:03:22.640 --> 00:03:30.140 The mystery, then, is why Sir Francis Bacon's dubious achievement garnered so much praise. 34 00:03:30.140 --> 00:03:34.460 One reason is that he succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist. 35 00:03:34.460 --> 00:03:39.060 He was the right man for his notions at the right time. 36 00:03:39.060 --> 00:03:45.700 For Bacon came after two centuries of sniping at scholasticism, which was now ripe for an 37 00:03:45.700 --> 00:03:48.740 open and all-out assault. 38 00:03:48.740 --> 00:03:55.380 Echoing many other thinkers of past generations, but putting it squarely and bluntly, Bacon 39 00:03:55.380 --> 00:04:01.580 divided all knowledge into two parts, divine and natural. 40 00:04:01.580 --> 00:04:07.340 Man's knowledge of supernatural and spiritual matters came from divine revelation, and that 41 00:04:07.340 --> 00:04:09.020 was that. 42 00:04:09.020 --> 00:04:16.740 On the other hand, knowledge of material affairs, man and the world around him, was wholly empirical, 43 00:04:16.740 --> 00:04:20.540 inductive, arrived at through the senses. 44 00:04:20.540 --> 00:04:26.640 In neither case was there any room for human reason, that great conduit of knowledge lauded 45 00:04:26.640 --> 00:04:31.320 by classical philosophy from the Greeks to the scholastics. 46 00:04:31.320 --> 00:04:37.120 Knowledge of spiritual and divine matters was purely fideistic, the product of faith 47 00:04:37.120 --> 00:04:39.840 in divine revelation. 48 00:04:39.840 --> 00:04:43.600 Earthly knowledge was purely sensate and empirical. 49 00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:47.640 There was no room for reason there, either. 50 00:04:47.640 --> 00:04:53.580 In ethical and political philosophy, then, Bacon found no room for the classical doctrine 51 00:04:53.580 --> 00:05:00.040 that human reason supplies knowledge of ethics through investigation of natural law. 52 00:05:00.040 --> 00:05:07.480 Instead, ethical knowledge is purely relative, the tentative accumulation of mounds of unsifted 53 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:09.920 historical data. 54 00:05:09.920 --> 00:05:15.520 And if there is no rational knowledge of ethics or natural law, then there are no natural 55 00:05:15.520 --> 00:05:20.840 rights limits to be placed on the power and actions of the state. 56 00:05:20.840 --> 00:05:27.200 Curiously enough, Bacon had the best of both worlds by proclaiming that endless arrays 57 00:05:27.200 --> 00:05:33.640 These of facts were not just the only conduit to knowledge, but that they would enable man 58 00:05:33.640 --> 00:05:38.320 to arrive at an ethics that would improve his life. 59 00:05:38.320 --> 00:05:44.520 The ultimate purpose of engaging in all the fact-grubbing was utilitarian. 60 00:05:44.520 --> 00:05:51.400 Yet how he expected valid ethical laws to emerge out of all this busy empiricism was 61 00:05:51.400 --> 00:05:53.880 left unexplained. 62 00:05:53.880 --> 00:06:00.840 Research, however, has cleared up some of the lacunae in Bacon's methodological position. 63 00:06:00.840 --> 00:06:07.560 For it turns out that much of Bacon's vaunted empiricism was not just ordinary science, 64 00:06:07.560 --> 00:06:13.840 but the allegedly empirical, mystical mumbo jumbo that various Renaissance thinkers had 65 00:06:13.840 --> 00:06:17.600 cobbled out of the ancient wisdom. 66 00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:23.220 Renaissance mysticism was a pseudo-science that combined the occult and magic traditions 67 00:06:23.220 --> 00:06:29.740 of the Hermetic Literature with that of a Christianized version of the Jewish Kabbalah. 68 00:06:29.740 --> 00:06:39.300 A year after Bacon died, his proposed despotic utopia, The New Atlantis, 1627, was published. 69 00:06:39.300 --> 00:06:46.020 In the Renaissance mystic tradition, Bacon proposed a utopia ruled by enlightened despots, 70 00:06:46.020 --> 00:06:49.860 in which all men are happy and content. 71 00:06:49.860 --> 00:06:56.380 Manliness was achieved because Adam's sin was not, as in the standard Christian tradition, 72 00:06:56.380 --> 00:07:01.460 trying to know too much and to become in some sense divine. 73 00:07:01.460 --> 00:07:07.460 On the contrary, the mystical hermetic view held that Adam's sin was turning his back 74 00:07:07.460 --> 00:07:12.420 on the ancient wisdom that could have been revealed to him. 75 00:07:12.420 --> 00:07:19.840 In contrast, man will now be made happy because wise rulers, possessed of this divine knowledge 76 00:07:19.840 --> 00:07:27.900 Research will guide man to perfection and happiness by fulfilling his true godlike nature. 77 00:07:27.900 --> 00:07:35.900 In Bacon's utopian novel, the symbols he used heavily, such as the rose or rosy cross, reveal 78 00:07:35.900 --> 00:07:42.100 Bacon's closeness to the newly founded and mysterious Rosicrucian order, which added 79 00:07:42.100 --> 00:07:49.580 to the rest of the ancient wisdom the pseudoscience of alchemy, in which man becomes as God in 80 00:07:49.580 --> 00:07:52.980 in helping to create the universe. 81 00:07:52.980 --> 00:08:00.020 The arrogant Baconian claim to be the prophet of the only true scientific method takes on 82 00:08:00.020 --> 00:08:06.540 a high irony when we realize that Francis Bacon's vision of science was close to that 83 00:08:06.540 --> 00:08:11.500 of the magic-oriented occultists of the Rosicrucian order. 84 00:08:11.500 --> 00:08:18.220 And since Renaissance occult knowledge was definitely part of the new spirit of the age, 85 00:08:18.220 --> 00:08:25.000 and later even of the allegedly rational enlightenment as well, Francis Bacon may be considered 86 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:32.700 far closer to the zeitgeist of his day than current Baconians would care to acknowledge. 87 00:08:32.700 --> 00:08:37.700 Francis Bacon was also in tune with the zeitgeist in another way. 88 00:08:37.700 --> 00:08:44.020 The simple-minded proclamation of the absolute power and glory of the English king was no 89 00:08:44.020 --> 00:08:50.220 was no longer as tenable as it had appeared to the Anglican theorists of the 16th or even 90 00:08:50.220 --> 00:08:56.340 to Bacon's absolutist contemporaries of the early 17th century. 91 00:08:56.340 --> 00:09:02.880 The naive argument by correspondence, the analogies to the lordship of God, the head 92 00:09:02.880 --> 00:09:09.660 on a single man's body, and to the king as head of the great body politic, was no longer 93 00:09:09.660 --> 00:09:13.480 being accepted as self-evident truth. 94 00:09:13.480 --> 00:09:18.760 The new discoveries and the expansion of the economy and of the nations of Europe into 95 00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:26.280 new worlds made the older view that any change wrought by human beings merely corrupted God's 96 00:09:26.280 --> 00:09:31.000 static order of nature increasingly untenable. 97 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:37.320 The idea that every man and group was born into a divinely ordained, fixed order and 98 00:09:37.320 --> 00:09:44.100 and Station in Life was rebutted by the increasing mobility and social and economic progress 99 00:09:44.100 --> 00:09:46.760 of the Western world. 100 00:09:46.760 --> 00:09:53.840 And so the old admixture of the material and the divine into one heady brew of unquestioned 101 00:09:53.840 --> 00:09:57.920 absolutism could no longer command respect. 102 00:09:57.920 --> 00:10:04.120 A new fallback position for the State and the monarch was necessary, one more in tune 103 00:10:04.120 --> 00:10:09.760 with the new fashion of science and scientific advance. 104 00:10:09.760 --> 00:10:17.060 And so the scientific realism of Sir Francis Bacon was perfectly suited to the new task. 105 00:10:17.060 --> 00:10:24.180 The idea that the King was quasi-divine or received an absolute divine imprimatur would 106 00:10:24.180 --> 00:10:26.200 no longer do. 107 00:10:26.200 --> 00:10:32.300 Sir Francis Bacon, in the service of the State, was far more the realistic political scientist 108 00:10:32.300 --> 00:10:40.760 Heralded by Machiavelli. Indeed, Bacon consciously modeled himself on Machiavelli's teachings. 109 00:10:40.760 --> 00:10:47.420 Like the neo-pagan Machiavelli, Bacon called upon his prince to do great deeds, to achieve 110 00:10:47.420 --> 00:10:54.500 glory. He particularly called upon the king to achieve empire, to expand and to conquer 111 00:10:54.500 --> 00:10:56.920 territories overseas. 112 00:10:56.920 --> 00:11:01.920 Domestically, Bacon was what might be called a moderate absolutist. 113 00:11:01.920 --> 00:11:10.920 The king's prerogative was still dominant, but this should be within the ancient historical constitution and should follow the law, 114 00:11:10.920 --> 00:11:18.920 and there should be at least discussions and debates in the courts and in parliament about royal decrees. 115 00:11:18.920 --> 00:11:31.920 Bacon went beyond most other apologists of empire by declaring it a high moral duty of the king to expand as well as preserve the bonds of empire. 116 00:11:31.920 --> 00:11:40.920 The duty to conquer went even beyond Machiavelli, who worried about undue speed in achieving conquest. 117 00:11:40.920 --> 00:11:57.920 To stand ready to serve the high duty of expanding empire, the British nation had to be trained in the study of arms, and particularly in naval prowess, and had to display the virtue of fortitude to be stout and warlike. 118 00:11:57.920 --> 00:12:07.920 This brings us to the last and not the least of the reasons for Bacon's enormous influence beyond the merits of his achievements. 119 00:12:07.920 --> 00:12:18.920 For Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verrolam, Viscount St. Albans, was one of the leading politicians and members of the power elite in Great Britain. 120 00:12:18.920 --> 00:12:33.920 He was first the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, 1509-1579, a close friend and brother-in-law of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, a leading aide to Queen Elizabeth. 121 00:12:33.920 --> 00:12:42.420 As a result, Nicholas Bacon became Privy Counselor, Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. 122 00:12:42.420 --> 00:12:47.420 Francis Bacon was therefore born with a silver spoon. 123 00:12:47.420 --> 00:12:56.920 As a young attorney, Bacon became a member of Parliament and, in 1591, a confidential adviser to the Earl of Essex, 124 00:12:56.920 --> 00:12:58.920 Favourite of the Queen 125 00:12:58.920 --> 00:13:13.920 As Essex began to lose favour with the Queen, the ever alert Bacon sensed the shift in the wind and turned against his old patron, taking the lead in the condemnation that led to Essex's execution. 126 00:13:13.920 --> 00:13:23.920 To explain this sordid affair, Bacon was assigned by the Queen to write what became the official public denunciation of Essex. 127 00:13:23.920 --> 00:13:30.560 Later, to quiet a festering canker of criticism, Bacon was moved to write an apology for his 128 00:13:30.560 --> 00:13:35.400 own treacherous role in the Essex affair. 129 00:13:35.400 --> 00:13:41.000 Despite Bacon's apologia, the Queen, for obvious reasons, continued not to trust him 130 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:47.440 very much, and political preferment eluded the highly placed courtier. 131 00:13:47.440 --> 00:13:54.100 After the new king, James I, however, Bacon came into his own, his career propelled by 132 00:13:54.100 --> 00:13:59.000 his cousin Thomas Cecil, the second Lord Burghley. 133 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:05.480 In 1608 Bacon became the king's solicitor and then attorney general. 134 00:14:05.480 --> 00:14:11.960 Finally in 1617 he followed in his father's footsteps as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal 135 00:14:11.960 --> 00:14:16.460 and the following year became Lord Chancellor. 136 00:14:16.460 --> 00:14:21.740 After three years in the nation's highest political post, however, Sir Francis Bacon 137 00:14:21.740 --> 00:14:23.980 was laid low. 138 00:14:23.980 --> 00:14:29.740 Charges of systematic bribery and corruption against him were proved, and he then confessed 139 00:14:29.740 --> 00:14:35.900 his guilt, retiring to private life and to pursuing his publishing career. 140 00:14:35.900 --> 00:14:41.280 Characteristically, while Bacon admitted to taking bribes, he claimed that they never 141 00:14:41.280 --> 00:14:48.380 affected his judgment and that his intentions had remained forever pure. Judging him by 142 00:14:48.380 --> 00:14:55.040 his own empirical method, however, one may be permitted to be skeptical of such metaphysical 143 00:14:55.040 --> 00:14:57.280 claims. 144 00:14:57.280 --> 00:15:04.200 In the narrowly economic sphere, Bacon's output was sparse and his opinions unremarkable, 145 00:15:04.200 --> 00:15:10.800 except for their scarcely being in the forefront of modern or scientific advance. On the balance 146 00:15:10.800 --> 00:15:31.800 In the balance of trade he took the standard, broadly mercantilist line. Thus, in his advice to Sir George Villiers, written in 1616, but only first published in 1661, Bacon hailed the export trade of merchandise which the English drive in foreign parts. 147 00:15:31.800 --> 00:15:45.800 The crucial point of the trade is that the exportation exceed in value the importation, for then, the balance of trade must of necessity be returned in coin or bullion. 148 00:15:45.800 --> 00:15:57.800 On the ancient question of usury, Bacon took a surprisingly reactionary and moralistic stand, calling for its prohibition on moral and religious grounds. 149 00:15:57.800 --> 00:16:04.060 More interestingly, he also declared that allowing high interest rates restricted beneficial 150 00:16:04.060 --> 00:16:12.060 agricultural improvements on behalf of riskier and presumably less worthy projects, an indication 151 00:16:12.060 --> 00:16:18.500 that some of the clamor to repress usury came from blue-chip investors who balked at the 152 00:16:18.500 --> 00:16:24.780 competition of more speculative borrowers willing to pay higher interest. 153 00:16:24.780 --> 00:16:30.620 In a similar vein, Bacon also attacked the charging of interest because it drew men from 154 00:16:30.620 --> 00:16:37.060 their appointed callings and brought them income they did not really earn. 155 00:16:37.060 --> 00:16:46.800 7. The Baconians, Sir William Petty and Political Arithmetic 156 00:16:46.800 --> 00:16:52.020 Since Bacon's thought fitted well into the spirit of the age, it is not surprising that 157 00:16:52.020 --> 00:16:59.020 and he developed enthusiastic followers. One little recognized follower was Thomas Hobbes, 158 00:16:59.020 --> 00:17:05.220 the philosophic apologist for monarchical absolutism, who on the eve of the Civil War 159 00:17:05.220 --> 00:17:12.100 was searching for a modern defense of monarchical despotism which relied neither on the outworn 160 00:17:12.100 --> 00:17:18.820 correspondence theory of order nor on the Grotian variant of natural law, as did his 161 00:17:18.820 --> 00:17:21.940 as Friends in the Two Circle. 162 00:17:21.940 --> 00:17:28.020 Grotius conservative version of consent theory held that the right of sovereignty had indeed 163 00:17:28.020 --> 00:17:34.740 originated with the people, but that the people, at some mercilessly distant point in the past, 164 00:17:34.740 --> 00:17:39.700 had surrendered their sovereignty irrevocably to the king. 165 00:17:39.700 --> 00:17:46.340 This defense of royal absolutism had been continued in England by the Two Circle, Hobbes 166 00:17:46.340 --> 00:17:54.020 His only disagreement being that each individual in the last analysis had the right of self-preservation, 167 00:17:54.020 --> 00:17:59.940 and therefore had the right to disobey any orders from the king that were tantamount to 168 00:17:59.940 --> 00:18:03.120 the particular individual's murder. 169 00:18:03.120 --> 00:18:10.100 But more importantly, Hobbes' political theory foreswore scholastic natural law methodology 170 00:18:10.100 --> 00:18:18.700 for a modern, mechanistic, scientistic methodology, far more in keeping with Francis Bacon. 171 00:18:18.700 --> 00:18:24.460 This shift is not surprising, considering that Hobbs served his philosophic apprenticeship 172 00:18:24.460 --> 00:18:28.460 as secretary to Bacon himself. 173 00:18:28.460 --> 00:18:34.500 Later on, in addition to a life in service to the royalist Cavendish family, Hobbs served 174 00:18:34.500 --> 00:18:40.180 and as a mathematical tutor to the future King Charles II. 175 00:18:40.180 --> 00:18:46.780 The leading Baconian in political economy, who was also fittingly a pioneer in statistics 176 00:18:46.780 --> 00:18:54.000 and in the alleged science of political arithmetic, was the fascinating opportunist and adventurer, 177 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:59.740 Sir William Petty, 1623-1687. 178 00:18:59.740 --> 00:19:05.300 Petty was the son of a poor rural cloth-worker from the county of Hampshire. 179 00:19:05.300 --> 00:19:11.620 He learnt Latin at a country school and was put to sea as a cabin boy at thirteen. 180 00:19:11.620 --> 00:19:17.140 When his leg was broken at sea, he was put ashore in France by the captain. 181 00:19:17.140 --> 00:19:24.780 Petty got himself admitted to the Jesuit University at Ca by applying for admission in Latin. 182 00:19:24.780 --> 00:19:30.500 There he received an excellent education in languages and mathematics, supporting himself 183 00:19:30.500 --> 00:19:38.660 by tutoring and trading in custom jewelry. Soon Petty was off to Holland to study medicine. 184 00:19:38.660 --> 00:19:45.780 There he became friendly with Dr. John Pell, Professor of Mathematics at Amsterdam. Traveling 185 00:19:45.780 --> 00:19:53.380 to Paris to study anatomy, Petty was armed with an introduction by Pell to Thomas Hobbes. 186 00:19:53.380 --> 00:20:00.040 Then Petty became Hobbes' secretary and research assistant, and from Hobbes imbibed Baconian 187 00:20:00.040 --> 00:20:05.680 and Hobbesian empiricism, mechanism and absolutism. 188 00:20:05.680 --> 00:20:11.540 Through Hobbes, Petty also joined advanced circles, including new scientists plus the 189 00:20:11.540 --> 00:20:14.840 philosophic friends of science. 190 00:20:14.840 --> 00:20:20.140 We must remember that science did not enjoy the professional specialization of the twentieth 191 00:20:20.140 --> 00:20:26.540 century, and new scientific discoveries were often made in an atmosphere of scientists 192 00:20:26.540 --> 00:20:31.440 surrounded by dilettantes philosophical cheerleaders. 193 00:20:31.440 --> 00:20:37.620 Through Hobbes, Petit participated in the Parisian Circle of Father Marin Mersenne, 194 00:20:37.620 --> 00:20:44.060 which included scientists such as Fermat and Gassendi, as well as philosopher-mathematicians 195 00:20:44.060 --> 00:20:47.860 Pascal and Descartes. 196 00:20:47.860 --> 00:20:54.980 After a year in Paris, Petty returned to England in 1646 to continue his medical studies at 197 00:20:54.980 --> 00:20:57.060 Oxford. 198 00:20:57.060 --> 00:21:03.420 Armed again with an introduction opening crucial doors from Professor Pell, Petty was embraced 199 00:21:03.420 --> 00:21:09.860 by the man who has been called the Master of Ceremonies to the New Learning, the enthusiastic 200 00:21:09.860 --> 00:21:16.620 Baconian, half-English Prussian immigrant from Poland and exile from Catholic rule, 201 00:21:16.620 --> 00:21:26.740 Samuel Hartleib, 1599-1670 Pell was Hartleib's earliest disciple, and his first job had been 202 00:21:26.740 --> 00:21:32.500 schoolmaster at a school run by the wealthy and well-connected Hartleib, whose father 203 00:21:32.500 --> 00:21:39.220 had been merchant royal to the King of Poland. With Hartleib's backing, Petty's career at 204 00:21:39.220 --> 00:21:46.540 Oxford now zoomed upward with incredible speed. Petty was welcomed into a circle of mathematicians 205 00:21:46.540 --> 00:22:05.060 This group, which called itself the Invisible College, not only received petty warmly, but 206 00:22:05.060 --> 00:22:11.220 they even met periodically at his lodgings, which, being at an apothecary's house, was 207 00:22:11.220 --> 00:22:17.500 is convenient to scientific and alchemical experimentation in drugs. 208 00:22:17.500 --> 00:22:24.580 Hardly did Petty become a fellow of Brasenose College in Oxford than he was made vice principal, 209 00:22:24.580 --> 00:22:29.220 and hardly did he become a physician when he was made professor of anatomy. 210 00:22:29.220 --> 00:22:37.140 Finally, Hartlib got his friend and protégé, Petty, made professor of music in 1651 at 211 00:22:37.140 --> 00:22:43.140 The Gresham College in London, a new college dedicated to the experimental and mechanical 212 00:22:43.140 --> 00:22:51.380 arts. Petty apparently taught the applied mathematics of music. At only 28, William 213 00:22:51.380 --> 00:22:58.000 Petty had been vaulted to the top of the academic profession. The rapidity of Petty's climb 214 00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:04.700 was undoubtedly aided by the fact that the new republican regime tossed out previously 215 00:23:04.700 --> 00:23:23.820 Heartlib also wrote voluminously inductive histories of trade, especially agriculture, 216 00:23:23.820 --> 00:23:27.020 helping to further the Baconian program. 217 00:23:27.020 --> 00:23:33.600 Rutlib himself was a friend and disciple of his fellow Baconian, the mystical millennialist 218 00:23:33.600 --> 00:23:44.140 Czech theologian and educationist Johann Amos Comenius, 1592-1670. Comenius, a bishop in 219 00:23:44.140 --> 00:23:50.840 the pietist Hussite Moravian Church and an exile from Catholic rule, was employed by 220 00:23:50.840 --> 00:23:55.400 by the Swedish government to organize its school system. 221 00:23:55.400 --> 00:24:02.600 He went beyond Bacon to invent a new hermetic religious system, pansofism, which promised 222 00:24:02.600 --> 00:24:08.440 to combine all the sciences in a mystical road to all knowledge. 223 00:24:08.440 --> 00:24:14.240 Hartleib subscribed to these gnostic tenets, and he also followed Bacon in outlining his 224 00:24:14.240 --> 00:24:21.360 and His Own New Utopia, which he called Macaria, 1641. 225 00:24:21.360 --> 00:24:28.120 Hartlib and Comenius were the favorite philosophers and theoreticians of the Puritan country gentry, 226 00:24:28.120 --> 00:24:31.160 the party of the Pims and the Cromwells. 227 00:24:31.160 --> 00:24:37.680 Indeed, in the summer of 1641, when the country Puritans thought that they had successfully 228 00:24:37.680 --> 00:24:44.600 After he achieved lasting rule under the King, Parliament eagerly brought Comenius to England, 229 00:24:44.600 --> 00:24:50.680 and it was during the autumn that Hartleib published his Macaria, a welfare state utopia 230 00:24:50.680 --> 00:24:54.840 he expected to institute in England. 231 00:24:54.840 --> 00:25:02.040 Arrived in England, Comenius drew up his own plans for a pansofical reform or transformation 232 00:25:02.040 --> 00:25:08.080 of the English Educational System, led by a pansofical college. 233 00:25:08.080 --> 00:25:14.040 Comenius proclaimed that the last age of the world is drawing near, in which Christ and 234 00:25:14.040 --> 00:25:19.760 His Church shall triumph, an age of enlightenment in which the earth shall be filled with the 235 00:25:19.760 --> 00:25:24.700 knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. 236 00:25:24.700 --> 00:25:30.720 The renewed outbreak of the Civil War put an end to plans for quiet social and educational 237 00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:37.440 Reconstruction, and so Comenius returned to the continent of Europe the following year, 238 00:25:37.440 --> 00:25:45.840 1642. But Hartleib and the others remained, and continued under munificent Puritan patronage. 239 00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:52.160 During Cromwell's protectorate, these Baconians flourished, and Pell and other Hartleib disciples 240 00:25:52.160 --> 00:25:59.200 were used by Cromwell as envoys to various Protestant countries in Europe. 241 00:25:59.200 --> 00:26:05.920 One of Hartleib's favorite continuing projects was to try to found new colleges and institutions 242 00:26:05.920 --> 00:26:08.760 to promote the new science. 243 00:26:08.760 --> 00:26:15.120 One prospective donnie was the wealthy, aristocratic and much younger friend, the distinguished 244 00:26:15.120 --> 00:26:21.280 physicist Robert Boyle, 1627-1691. 245 00:26:21.280 --> 00:26:27.560 At one point, Hartleib tried to get Boyle to finance William Petty in compiling A History 246 00:26:27.560 --> 00:26:29.720 of All Trades. 247 00:26:29.720 --> 00:26:36.760 At another point, Petty, in his first published work at the age of 25, urged Hartleib to finance 248 00:26:36.760 --> 00:26:43.720 a new college to advance real learning, which would be a gymnasium medicum or a college 249 00:26:43.720 --> 00:26:45.840 of tradesmen. 250 00:26:45.840 --> 00:26:51.520 This college, wrote Petty, would provide the best and most effectual opportunities and 251 00:26:51.520 --> 00:26:59.120 means for writing a history of trades in perfection and exactness. Neither of these particular 252 00:26:59.120 --> 00:27:02.880 projects was to pan out. 253 00:27:02.880 --> 00:27:10.280 No sooner had William Petty reached the apex of academia in 1651, however, and before giving 254 00:27:10.280 --> 00:27:17.320 his first lecture, than he left the university world for good. He was out to make a fortune, 255 00:27:17.320 --> 00:27:23.240 And he saw his opportunity in the midst of Cromwell's devastating conquest and decimation 256 00:27:23.240 --> 00:27:25.120 of Ireland. 257 00:27:25.120 --> 00:27:31.480 A fellow Oxford Invisible, Jonathan Goddard, had gone off to become physician-in-chief 258 00:27:31.480 --> 00:27:38.080 of Cromwell's army in Ireland and had returned two years later to the prestigious post of 259 00:27:38.080 --> 00:27:43.920 Warden of Merton College, taking a two-year leave from Oxford. 260 00:27:43.920 --> 00:27:50.240 Petty went to Ireland as Goddard's replacement. When Petty got to Ireland, he found a golden 261 00:27:50.240 --> 00:27:57.080 opportunity to make his fortune. Cromwell had despoiled Irish lands and decided to pay 262 00:27:57.080 --> 00:28:03.400 his soldiers and the financial supporters of his military campaign by handing out conquered 263 00:28:03.400 --> 00:28:11.000 and confiscated Irish land. But to parcel out the land, it first had to be surveyed, 264 00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:17.560 This task was being conducted by a Surveyor General, a friend of Petty and Hartleib, Dr. 265 00:28:17.560 --> 00:28:23.360 Benjamin Worsley, a fellow physician who had published influential pamphlets that led 266 00:28:23.360 --> 00:28:30.660 to the Navigation Act of 1652, a mercantilist measure for the subsidizing and privileging 267 00:28:30.660 --> 00:28:32.520 of English shipping. 268 00:28:32.520 --> 00:28:37.560 Petty, however, did not let friendship stand in his way. 269 00:28:37.560 --> 00:28:43.540 Reaching Ireland in the autumn of 1652 and sizing up the situation, Petty launched a 270 00:28:43.540 --> 00:28:49.760 propaganda campaign denouncing the alleged slowness of Worsley's survey and promising 271 00:28:49.760 --> 00:28:58.840 to perform the task himself in a mere 13 months. Getting the job in February 1653, despite 272 00:28:58.840 --> 00:29:05.920 the ferocious opposition of Worsley, Petty indeed completed the task on time. 273 00:29:05.920 --> 00:29:11.620 With the huge sum of cash earned from this job, Petty set about accumulating ownership 274 00:29:11.620 --> 00:29:14.880 of the confiscated Irish lands. 275 00:29:14.880 --> 00:29:21.600 Some lands he acquired in lieu of cash payment, others he got by buying land claims from needy 276 00:29:21.600 --> 00:29:23.880 English soldiers. 277 00:29:23.880 --> 00:29:32.240 By 1660, William Petty had accumulated Irish landed estates totaling 100,000 acres, making 278 00:29:32.240 --> 00:29:49.240 In fact, his eventual accumulation of Irish land was still greater, for by the time of his death in 1687, Petty owned 270,000 acres in South Kerry alone. 279 00:29:49.240 --> 00:29:59.240 By the late 1650s, Petty was back in London, serving for a time in parliament and renewing his friendships in scientific circles. 280 00:29:59.240 --> 00:30:07.800 Back in England, Petty joined a Baconian-Hartlibian circle headed by another German émigré, 281 00:30:07.800 --> 00:30:14.320 Theodor Haak, the organizing secretary of Comenius English Disciples. 282 00:30:14.320 --> 00:30:21.000 Other members included Dr. Jonathan Goddard, now Protector Cromwell's personal physician, 283 00:30:21.000 --> 00:30:27.160 and the famed architect Christopher Wren, whose first architectural work was a transparent 284 00:30:27.160 --> 00:30:32.160 and the three-story beehive-like structure built for Hartleib. 285 00:30:32.160 --> 00:30:38.160 The group met largely in the Oxford home of Cromwell's brother-in-law, John Wilkins, 286 00:30:38.160 --> 00:30:43.160 whom the protector had made ruler of Oxford University. 287 00:30:43.160 --> 00:30:48.160 The Baconians, it must be understood, though flourishing under Cromwell, 288 00:30:48.160 --> 00:30:53.160 were never truly committed to any particular form of government. 289 00:30:53.160 --> 00:30:57.160 Like in himself, they could flourish under an absolute monarchy. 290 00:30:57.160 --> 00:31:04.160 Monarchy, republic, parliament, crown, church, all these forms of government made no particular 291 00:31:04.160 --> 00:31:10.720 difference to these scientific, value-free, would-be rulers of the nation. 292 00:31:10.720 --> 00:31:16.960 So long as the regime was sufficiently statist and at least nominally Protestant, the polity 293 00:31:16.960 --> 00:31:23.960 could afford ample scope for the dreams of power and science held by these Baconian philosophers 294 00:31:23.960 --> 00:31:31.420 and men of affairs. Hence Petty and his colleagues, always seekers of the main chance whatever 295 00:31:31.420 --> 00:31:38.280 the government, were well placed when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660. Petty 296 00:31:38.280 --> 00:31:44.560 himself was well received at the court of Charles II, who granted him a knighthood, 297 00:31:44.560 --> 00:31:52.260 And in 1662, Petty's and his colleagues' Baconian dreams culminated when Petty became a founding 298 00:31:52.260 --> 00:31:59.760 member of the newly chartered Royal Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge. 299 00:31:59.760 --> 00:32:06.640 The Royal Society was specifically dedicated to the Baconian project of empirical observation 300 00:32:06.640 --> 00:32:13.420 and experiment, first to the study of the natural world and technology, and then to 301 00:32:13.420 --> 00:32:16.300 to the Study of Society. 302 00:32:16.300 --> 00:32:22.280 Throughout his life, Petty remained an active member of the Royal Society, especially contributing 303 00:32:22.280 --> 00:32:26.820 to its studies of the history of trades and technology. 304 00:32:26.820 --> 00:32:33.740 Petty's own contribution, political arithmetic, or statistics, he saw as the application of 305 00:32:33.740 --> 00:32:39.640 the empiricist Baconian program to the social world. 306 00:32:39.640 --> 00:32:45.480 True to Petty's goal of empirical science, each of his studies was designed to promote 307 00:32:45.480 --> 00:32:49.720 his own economic or political advancement. 308 00:32:49.720 --> 00:32:57.360 His major publication, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, was published in 1662 and 309 00:32:57.360 --> 00:33:01.120 went into three further editions in his lifetime. 310 00:33:01.120 --> 00:33:07.360 Petty, however, was disappointed since the track did not lead to his hoped-for public 311 00:33:07.360 --> 00:33:14.360 Office or Political Influence. Petty's later tracts were written but not published in his 312 00:33:14.360 --> 00:33:22.320 lifetime, the others being published in 1690 or later after his death. This was because, 313 00:33:22.320 --> 00:33:28.400 in the words of a generally admiring historian, they were written not for publication but 314 00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:34.520 for circulation in the corridors of power or with a view to acquiring influence and 315 00:33:34.520 --> 00:33:40.960 and Jobs, which he never managed to obtain. And even though Petty's daughter from a marriage 316 00:33:40.960 --> 00:33:47.960 a few years later was to give rise to the aristocratic Shelburne and Lansdowne families, 317 00:33:47.960 --> 00:33:53.760 Petty derived little enjoyment from his vast, ill-gotten lands in Ireland, since he had 318 00:33:53.760 --> 00:34:01.000 to spend half his days in that country defending his claims from lawsuits from royalist claimants 319 00:34:01.000 --> 00:34:07.800 or his lands from bandits who believed that he had despoiled their land. 320 00:34:07.800 --> 00:34:14.600 As befitted a presumed experimental scientist, Petty claimed several important inventions, 321 00:34:14.600 --> 00:34:21.060 only one of which, however, the double-hulled ship, ever came to fruition. He spent a great 322 00:34:21.060 --> 00:34:26.120 deal of money building several versions of this ship, but they all suffered from the 323 00:34:26.120 --> 00:34:47.400 What then was there about Sir William Petty that, despite his gifts, his seizure of the 324 00:34:47.400 --> 00:34:54.120 main chance and his powerful friends, brought him up sharply against a glass ceiling that 325 00:34:54.120 --> 00:34:59.920 that limited his political influence and his power at court, and that led even the King 326 00:34:59.920 --> 00:35:05.120 of England to treat his discomfiture with malicious glee. 327 00:35:05.120 --> 00:35:11.280 Apart from his sabotage of Benjamin Worsley, the problem was that Petty could not resist 328 00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:18.040 the impolitic dig, whether he was wickedly mimicking the aristocracy at a party or was 329 00:35:18.040 --> 00:35:23.560 was reproving His Majesty's policies in the very pamphlet he was writing to court the 330 00:35:23.560 --> 00:35:25.720 King's favor. 331 00:35:25.720 --> 00:35:31.520 Not being a gentleman by birth, Sir William could ill afford to act less than a gentleman 332 00:35:31.520 --> 00:35:34.240 to his betters. 333 00:35:34.240 --> 00:35:40.240 While publishing his treatise of taxes, Petty delivered several papers to the Royal Society 334 00:35:40.240 --> 00:35:46.680 on the histories of the dying of cloth and shipping, advancing the Baconian History of 335 00:35:46.680 --> 00:35:54.320 Trades Program. His major work, The Political Arithmetic, was written in the 1670s and 336 00:35:54.320 --> 00:36:01.480 published posthumously in 1690. The goal was to show that England, far from suffering 337 00:36:01.480 --> 00:36:08.520 from a decline as commonly believed, was actually wealthier than ever before. In The Political 338 00:36:08.520 --> 00:36:15.700 Arithmetic, Petty claimed to eschew mere words and intellectual arguments and state only 339 00:36:15.700 --> 00:36:22.540 Arguments of Sense, that is, derived from sensate facts of nature, which could all be 340 00:36:22.540 --> 00:36:29.440 boiled down to number, weight and measure, a slogan which he enjoyed repeating on many 341 00:36:29.440 --> 00:36:30.440 occasions. 342 00:36:30.440 --> 00:36:37.040 Thus, at the end of an essay on algebra, Petty grandiloquently maintained that he had at 343 00:36:37.040 --> 00:36:45.000 last applied algebra to other than purely mathematical matters, for example, to policy, 344 00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:52.240 by the name of political arithmetic, by reducing many terms of matter to terms of number, weight 345 00:36:52.240 --> 00:36:57.180 and measure in order to be handled mathematically. 346 00:36:57.180 --> 00:37:01.560 In fact, there is virtually no mathematics in Petty. 347 00:37:01.560 --> 00:37:08.420 What there is are statistics, loosely gathered and arbitrarily asserted, employing many hidden 348 00:37:08.420 --> 00:37:14.800 assumptions to arrive at preordained ideological conclusions. 349 00:37:14.800 --> 00:37:21.080 As William Letwin writes in his rewarding study of Petty, Petty's way with numbers, 350 00:37:21.080 --> 00:37:28.000 here as always, was utterly cavalier. The facts, whatever they were, always had a congenial 351 00:37:28.000 --> 00:37:35.320 way of upholding Petty's conclusions. Or, rather, Petty's factual assertions did, for 352 00:37:35.320 --> 00:37:42.200 he was not averse to citing authorities mysterious, unknown and even nonexistent when he needed 353 00:37:42.200 --> 00:37:51.720 Letwin then cites the conclusion of Major Greenwood, a modern historian of statistics. 354 00:37:51.720 --> 00:37:58.320 It is not, I believe, too cynical to say that any calculation Petty made would have produced 355 00:37:58.320 --> 00:38:01.920 war losses around 600,000. 356 00:38:01.920 --> 00:38:08.700 At one point, Petty actually submits the justification for his arbitrary figures and assumptions 357 00:38:08.700 --> 00:38:14.360 that they make no difference anyway, since the figures are not totally false, and therefore 358 00:38:14.360 --> 00:38:21.580 can illustrate the method of arriving at knowledge. But fake illustrations, of course, are scarcely 359 00:38:21.580 --> 00:38:28.900 an advertisement for the method of political arithmetic. Thus Petty tried to come to conclusions 360 00:38:28.900 --> 00:38:35.900 pleasing to the king that England was gaining, not declining, in wealth by borrowing the 361 00:38:35.900 --> 00:38:40.900 and the spurious precision of numbers and the prestige of science. 362 00:38:40.900 --> 00:38:46.900 Sometimes his conclusions were so wildly optimistic as to abandon all sense, 363 00:38:46.900 --> 00:38:51.900 as when he claimed that it was a very feasible matter for the King of England subjects 364 00:38:51.900 --> 00:38:56.900 to gain the universal trade of the whole commercial world. 365 00:38:56.900 --> 00:39:02.900 In the course of his discussions, Petty delivered himself of some economic theories, 366 00:39:02.900 --> 00:39:10.660 Qualitative, not quantitative theories, we might add, in violation of his stated program. 367 00:39:10.660 --> 00:39:16.660 They were either not very remarkable, urging the king not to levy taxes that are so high 368 00:39:16.660 --> 00:39:24.060 they will lead to severe declines in output or employment, or incorrect, such as attributing 369 00:39:24.060 --> 00:39:30.260 the value of goods not to the demand for them but to their costs of production. 370 00:39:30.260 --> 00:39:38.500 Indeed, the quality of Petty's economic reasoning was generally that of a jejun mercantilist. 371 00:39:38.500 --> 00:39:45.160 Like all early modern writers, with the exception of Botero, Petty was a naïve expansionist 372 00:39:45.160 --> 00:39:46.820 on population. 373 00:39:46.820 --> 00:39:51.740 The more people, the more income and output will increase. 374 00:39:51.740 --> 00:39:57.260 Like mercantilists generally, Petty counseled and identified with the aristocratic power 375 00:39:57.260 --> 00:40:12.260 His yen for increased or full employment stemmed from a wish to increase the national output at the command of the state, and employed by the elite. 376 00:40:12.260 --> 00:40:25.260 So little was petty, like most mercantilists concerned for the laboring classes, that he denounced them for becoming more idle and drunken whenever their real wages rose. 377 00:40:25.260 --> 00:40:50.260 Petty, in fact, was more imaginative than his mercantilist, Kohn Freres, in proposing a governmental price-support scheme for keeping up the price of corn, specifically in order to prevent real wage rates from ever rising and thereby keeping the workers' noses to the grindstone and preventing them from enjoying more idleness or leisure. 378 00:40:50.260 --> 00:40:58.940 Petty, indeed, denounced these laborers as the vile and brutish part of mankind. 379 00:40:58.940 --> 00:41:04.060 Sometimes Petty's imagination ran away with him, his zeal for increasing the laboring 380 00:41:04.060 --> 00:41:10.540 population of England leading him to recommend, in the political arithmetic, forcibly moving 381 00:41:10.540 --> 00:41:16.980 the bulk of the population of Scotland and Ireland to England, allegedly in their own 382 00:41:16.980 --> 00:41:31.380 The 17th Century enthusiasm for the sciences, building upon the quasi-underground, age-old 383 00:41:31.380 --> 00:41:38.380 numerological mysticism of the Hermetic and Kabbalah tradition, led to an arrogant frenzy 384 00:41:38.380 --> 00:41:46.320 of enthusiasm for quantitative and mathematical study of social life as well among the scientists 385 00:41:46.320 --> 00:41:49.320 and especially their cheering sections. 386 00:41:49.320 --> 00:41:55.080 The eminent Harvard sociologist Peter Riem Sorokin has perceptively referred to this 387 00:41:55.080 --> 00:42:01.520 frenzy from that day to the present as quantophrenia and metromania. 388 00:42:01.520 --> 00:42:09.560 Thus, writes Sorokin, the mathematical study of psychosocial phenomena was especially cultivated 389 00:42:09.560 --> 00:42:17.360 in the 17th and the 18th centuries. Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton and others began 390 00:42:17.360 --> 00:42:24.860 to build a universal quantitative science, pentometrica or mathesis universi, with its 391 00:42:24.860 --> 00:42:33.160 branches of psychometrica, ethicometrica and sociometrica, designed for investigating psychosocial 392 00:42:33.160 --> 00:42:45.200 All truths are discovered only through measurement, and, without mathematics, human beings would 393 00:42:45.200 --> 00:42:52.880 live as animals and beasts, were the mottos of the social physicists of these centuries. 394 00:42:52.880 --> 00:42:58.520 William Letwin writes perceptively of this metaphronic phenomenon among the Baconians 395 00:42:58.520 --> 00:43:02.560 of England during the Stuart Restoration period. 396 00:43:02.560 --> 00:43:09.080 The scientific revolution of this period, writes Latwin, owed much of its vigor to faith, 397 00:43:09.080 --> 00:43:15.720 the simple belief that many things in nature, as yet mysterious, could and should be measured 398 00:43:15.720 --> 00:43:17.120 precisely. 399 00:43:17.120 --> 00:43:24.840 Unfortunately, hand in hand with this revolutionary ideal went a devout but misplaced notion that 400 00:43:24.840 --> 00:43:30.480 to measure and to understand were one and the same. 401 00:43:30.480 --> 00:43:37.360 Letwin scientists believe that to cast a mathematical mantle over a problem was tantamount to solving 402 00:43:37.360 --> 00:43:38.660 it. 403 00:43:38.660 --> 00:43:45.120 As a result, Letwin goes on, the scientists united themselves in the royal society and 404 00:43:45.120 --> 00:43:49.180 set off on an absolute orgy of measurement. 405 00:43:49.180 --> 00:43:56.700 The virtuosi continued, endlessly and pointlessly, to record, catalogue and count. 406 00:43:56.700 --> 00:44:02.480 The best minds of England squandered their talents in minutely recording temperature, 407 00:44:02.480 --> 00:44:09.040 wind and the look of the skies hour by hour in various corners of the land. 408 00:44:09.040 --> 00:44:14.920 Their efforts produced nothing more than the unusable records. 409 00:44:14.920 --> 00:44:20.440 This impassioned energy was turned also to the measurement of economic and social dimensions 410 00:44:20.440 --> 00:44:22.360 of various sorts. 411 00:44:22.360 --> 00:44:27.760 The search for number, weight and measure was conducted in the happy belief that good 412 00:44:27.760 --> 00:44:31.880 numbers would inevitably make for good policy. 413 00:44:31.880 --> 00:44:38.960 Unfortunately, this quantophrenia and metrophrenia seems to have taken over the modern economics 414 00:44:38.960 --> 00:44:39.960 profession. 415 00:44:39.960 --> 00:44:46.000 Fortunately, for the development of economic thought, however, the quantophrenic enthusiasm 416 00:44:46.000 --> 00:44:52.000 in the social sciences dribbled away after the effusion of some Baconian writers in the 417 00:44:52.000 --> 00:44:58.120 in the 1690s. It would be nice to think that this decline was speeded up by the brilliant 418 00:44:58.120 --> 00:45:05.840 and devastating satires directed against the Baconians in the 1720s by the great Tory libertarian 419 00:45:05.840 --> 00:45:16.880 Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. In his classic Gulliver's Travels, Swift 420 00:45:16.880 --> 00:45:23.000 Swift effectively lampooned the crazed scientists of Laputa and elsewhere who were putting into 421 00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:28.280 effect what would now be called the Baconian Research Program. 422 00:45:28.280 --> 00:45:36.920 Finally, in 1729, Swift followed up this satire with his famous modest proposal, what Letwin 423 00:45:36.920 --> 00:45:43.920 justly calls the last word on political arithmetic as an instrument of social policy. 424 00:45:43.920 --> 00:45:50.120 For Swift went after Petty, taking as his text Petty's claim that the more people the 425 00:45:50.120 --> 00:45:56.960 better, and, in particular, Petty's serious proposal in his treatise of taxes to cure 426 00:45:56.960 --> 00:46:04.360 Ireland's alleged cause of poverty underpopulation by urging government subsidies for births 427 00:46:04.360 --> 00:46:07.600 among unmarried Irish women. 428 00:46:07.600 --> 00:46:14.720 The subsidies were to be financed by a tax on all Irish, especially on Irish men. 429 00:46:14.720 --> 00:46:20.360 The subsidies were only to be allowed if the woman kept records registering each father's 430 00:46:20.360 --> 00:46:28.720 time of cohabitation and signed agreements by the father on the disposal of the children. 431 00:46:28.720 --> 00:46:35.640 Swift's modest proposal satirized every aspect of petty style, from the solemnly avowed absurd 432 00:46:35.640 --> 00:46:40.640 policy proposals to the fake precision of the numerological style. 433 00:46:40.640 --> 00:46:47.200 Thus the modest proposal doggedly stated, The number of souls in this kingdom being 434 00:46:47.200 --> 00:46:54.960 usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about 200,000 435 00:46:54.960 --> 00:47:01.540 couples whose wives are breeders, from which number I subtract 30,000 couples who are able 436 00:47:01.540 --> 00:47:04.560 to maintain their own children. 437 00:47:04.560 --> 00:47:11.040 This being granted, there will remain 170,000 breeders. 438 00:47:11.040 --> 00:47:16.920 After making due deductions for miscarriage or for children who die each year, Swift is 439 00:47:16.920 --> 00:47:23.460 left with 120,000 children of poor parents annually born. 440 00:47:23.460 --> 00:47:29.120 After demonstrating that there is no way by which these poor children can be reared or 441 00:47:29.120 --> 00:47:37.440 employed, Swift concludes with his famous modest proposal, not liable to the least objection. 442 00:47:37.440 --> 00:47:42.720 Being assured by a knowledgeable American in London that a young, healthy, well-nourished 443 00:47:42.720 --> 00:47:49.400 child of one year old is a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, 444 00:47:49.400 --> 00:47:56.160 roasted, baked or boiled, Swift then goes on to demonstrate in the best value-free, 445 00:47:56.160 --> 00:48:02.640 In a numerological, empiricist, petty-ite manner, the economic advantages of selling 446 00:48:02.640 --> 00:48:07.520 100,000 children per annum to be eaten. 447 00:48:07.520 --> 00:48:13.080 Most of the special pleading economic writers of the day ended their tracts professing no 448 00:48:13.080 --> 00:48:17.660 personal gain and their devotion to the public wheel. 449 00:48:17.660 --> 00:48:22.640 And so Swift ends his modest proposal accordingly. 450 00:48:22.640 --> 00:48:28.540 I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the least personal interest in 451 00:48:28.540 --> 00:48:34.280 endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good 452 00:48:34.280 --> 00:48:41.240 of my country by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving 453 00:48:41.240 --> 00:48:43.520 some pleasure to the rich. 454 00:48:43.520 --> 00:48:48.760 I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny, the youngest being 455 00:48:48.760 --> 00:48:52.760 I am 9 years old and my wife passed childbearing.