6. Prophet of Empiricism, Sir Francis Bacon
The status and reputation of Sir Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626, is one of the great puzzles
in the history of social thought. On the one hand, Bacon was universally hailed as the
greatest man of his age. Over a century later in the great manifesto of the French Enlightenment,
and the Encyclopedia, Bacon was hailed extravagantly as the greatest, the most universal and the
most eloquent of philosophers.
Yet what had he actually accomplished to warrant all of the accolades?
This prolific statesman and writer with great fanfare and self-advertisement in a series
of books from the 1600s to the 1620s set forth a series of injunctions about the proper method
of Scientific Inquiry into the World, including Social as well as Natural Sciences.
Essentially, Bacon wrote numerous exhortations to everyone else to engage in detailed factual
investigation into all life, all the world, all human history.
Francis Bacon was the prophet of primitive and naive empiricism, the guru of fact-grubbing.
Look at the facts, all the facts, long enough, he opined, and knowledge, including theoretical
knowledge, will rise phoenix-like, self-supporting and self-sustained out of the mountainous
heap of data.
Although he talked impressively about surveying in detail all the facts of human knowledge,
Bacon himself never came close to fulfilling this monstrous task.
Essentially, he was the meta-empiricist, the head coach and cheerleader of fact-grubbing,
exhorting other people to gather all the facts and castigating any alternative method of
knowledge.
He claimed to have invented a new logic, the only correct form of material knowledge, induction,
by which enormous masses of details could somehow form themselves into general truths.
This sort of accomplishment is dubious at best.
Not only was it a prolegomenon to knowledge rather than knowledge itself, it was completely
wrong about how science has ever done its work.
No scientific truths are ever discovered by inchoate fact-digging.
The scientist must first have framed hypotheses. In short, the scientist, before gathering
and collating facts, must have a pretty good idea of what to look for and why. Once in
a while, social scientists get misled by Baconian notions into thinking that their knowledge
is purely factual, without presuppositions and therefore scientific, when what this really
means is that their presuppositions and assumptions remain hidden from view.
The mystery, then, is why Sir Francis Bacon's dubious achievement garnered so much praise.
One reason is that he succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist.
He was the right man for his notions at the right time.
For Bacon came after two centuries of sniping at scholasticism, which was now ripe for an
open and all-out assault.
Echoing many other thinkers of past generations, but putting it squarely and bluntly, Bacon
divided all knowledge into two parts, divine and natural.
Man's knowledge of supernatural and spiritual matters came from divine revelation, and that
was that.
On the other hand, knowledge of material affairs, man and the world around him, was wholly empirical,
inductive, arrived at through the senses.
In neither case was there any room for human reason, that great conduit of knowledge lauded
by classical philosophy from the Greeks to the scholastics.
Knowledge of spiritual and divine matters was purely fideistic, the product of faith
in divine revelation.
Earthly knowledge was purely sensate and empirical.
There was no room for reason there, either.
In ethical and political philosophy, then, Bacon found no room for the classical doctrine
that human reason supplies knowledge of ethics through investigation of natural law.
Instead, ethical knowledge is purely relative, the tentative accumulation of mounds of unsifted
historical data.
And if there is no rational knowledge of ethics or natural law, then there are no natural
rights limits to be placed on the power and actions of the state.
Curiously enough, Bacon had the best of both worlds by proclaiming that endless arrays
These of facts were not just the only conduit to knowledge, but that they would enable man
to arrive at an ethics that would improve his life.
The ultimate purpose of engaging in all the fact-grubbing was utilitarian.
Yet how he expected valid ethical laws to emerge out of all this busy empiricism was
left unexplained.
Research, however, has cleared up some of the lacunae in Bacon's methodological position.
For it turns out that much of Bacon's vaunted empiricism was not just ordinary science,
but the allegedly empirical, mystical mumbo jumbo that various Renaissance thinkers had
cobbled out of the ancient wisdom.
Renaissance mysticism was a pseudo-science that combined the occult and magic traditions
of the Hermetic Literature with that of a Christianized version of the Jewish Kabbalah.
A year after Bacon died, his proposed despotic utopia, The New Atlantis, 1627, was published.
In the Renaissance mystic tradition, Bacon proposed a utopia ruled by enlightened despots,
in which all men are happy and content.
Manliness was achieved because Adam's sin was not, as in the standard Christian tradition,
trying to know too much and to become in some sense divine.
On the contrary, the mystical hermetic view held that Adam's sin was turning his back
on the ancient wisdom that could have been revealed to him.
In contrast, man will now be made happy because wise rulers, possessed of this divine knowledge
Research will guide man to perfection and happiness by fulfilling his true godlike nature.
In Bacon's utopian novel, the symbols he used heavily, such as the rose or rosy cross, reveal
Bacon's closeness to the newly founded and mysterious Rosicrucian order, which added
to the rest of the ancient wisdom the pseudoscience of alchemy, in which man becomes as God in
in helping to create the universe.
The arrogant Baconian claim to be the prophet of the only true scientific method takes on
a high irony when we realize that Francis Bacon's vision of science was close to that
of the magic-oriented occultists of the Rosicrucian order.
And since Renaissance occult knowledge was definitely part of the new spirit of the age,
and later even of the allegedly rational enlightenment as well, Francis Bacon may be considered
far closer to the zeitgeist of his day than current Baconians would care to acknowledge.
Francis Bacon was also in tune with the zeitgeist in another way.
The simple-minded proclamation of the absolute power and glory of the English king was no
was no longer as tenable as it had appeared to the Anglican theorists of the 16th or even
to Bacon's absolutist contemporaries of the early 17th century.
The naive argument by correspondence, the analogies to the lordship of God, the head
on a single man's body, and to the king as head of the great body politic, was no longer
being accepted as self-evident truth.
The new discoveries and the expansion of the economy and of the nations of Europe into
new worlds made the older view that any change wrought by human beings merely corrupted God's
static order of nature increasingly untenable.
The idea that every man and group was born into a divinely ordained, fixed order and
and Station in Life was rebutted by the increasing mobility and social and economic progress
of the Western world.
And so the old admixture of the material and the divine into one heady brew of unquestioned
absolutism could no longer command respect.
A new fallback position for the State and the monarch was necessary, one more in tune
with the new fashion of science and scientific advance.
And so the scientific realism of Sir Francis Bacon was perfectly suited to the new task.
The idea that the King was quasi-divine or received an absolute divine imprimatur would
no longer do.
Sir Francis Bacon, in the service of the State, was far more the realistic political scientist
Heralded by Machiavelli. Indeed, Bacon consciously modeled himself on Machiavelli's teachings.
Like the neo-pagan Machiavelli, Bacon called upon his prince to do great deeds, to achieve
glory. He particularly called upon the king to achieve empire, to expand and to conquer
territories overseas.
Domestically, Bacon was what might be called a moderate absolutist.
The king's prerogative was still dominant, but this should be within the ancient historical constitution and should follow the law,
and there should be at least discussions and debates in the courts and in parliament about royal decrees.
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.
The duty to conquer went even beyond Machiavelli, who worried about undue speed in achieving conquest.
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.
This brings us to the last and not the least of the reasons for Bacon's enormous influence beyond the merits of his achievements.
For Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verrolam, Viscount St. Albans, was one of the leading politicians and members of the power elite in Great Britain.
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.
As a result, Nicholas Bacon became Privy Counselor, Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.
Francis Bacon was therefore born with a silver spoon.
As a young attorney, Bacon became a member of Parliament and, in 1591, a confidential adviser to the Earl of Essex,
Favourite of the Queen
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.
To explain this sordid affair, Bacon was assigned by the Queen to write what became the official public denunciation of Essex.
Later, to quiet a festering canker of criticism, Bacon was moved to write an apology for his
own treacherous role in the Essex affair.
Despite Bacon's apologia, the Queen, for obvious reasons, continued not to trust him
very much, and political preferment eluded the highly placed courtier.
After the new king, James I, however, Bacon came into his own, his career propelled by
his cousin Thomas Cecil, the second Lord Burghley.
In 1608 Bacon became the king's solicitor and then attorney general.
Finally in 1617 he followed in his father's footsteps as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal
and the following year became Lord Chancellor.
After three years in the nation's highest political post, however, Sir Francis Bacon
was laid low.
Charges of systematic bribery and corruption against him were proved, and he then confessed
his guilt, retiring to private life and to pursuing his publishing career.
Characteristically, while Bacon admitted to taking bribes, he claimed that they never
affected his judgment and that his intentions had remained forever pure. Judging him by
his own empirical method, however, one may be permitted to be skeptical of such metaphysical
claims.
In the narrowly economic sphere, Bacon's output was sparse and his opinions unremarkable,
except for their scarcely being in the forefront of modern or scientific advance. On the balance
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.
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.
On the ancient question of usury, Bacon took a surprisingly reactionary and moralistic stand, calling for its prohibition on moral and religious grounds.
More interestingly, he also declared that allowing high interest rates restricted beneficial
agricultural improvements on behalf of riskier and presumably less worthy projects, an indication
that some of the clamor to repress usury came from blue-chip investors who balked at the
competition of more speculative borrowers willing to pay higher interest.
In a similar vein, Bacon also attacked the charging of interest because it drew men from
their appointed callings and brought them income they did not really earn.
7. The Baconians, Sir William Petty and Political Arithmetic
Since Bacon's thought fitted well into the spirit of the age, it is not surprising that
and he developed enthusiastic followers. One little recognized follower was Thomas Hobbes,
the philosophic apologist for monarchical absolutism, who on the eve of the Civil War
was searching for a modern defense of monarchical despotism which relied neither on the outworn
correspondence theory of order nor on the Grotian variant of natural law, as did his
as Friends in the Two Circle.
Grotius conservative version of consent theory held that the right of sovereignty had indeed
originated with the people, but that the people, at some mercilessly distant point in the past,
had surrendered their sovereignty irrevocably to the king.
This defense of royal absolutism had been continued in England by the Two Circle, Hobbes
His only disagreement being that each individual in the last analysis had the right of self-preservation,
and therefore had the right to disobey any orders from the king that were tantamount to
the particular individual's murder.
But more importantly, Hobbes' political theory foreswore scholastic natural law methodology
for a modern, mechanistic, scientistic methodology, far more in keeping with Francis Bacon.
This shift is not surprising, considering that Hobbs served his philosophic apprenticeship
as secretary to Bacon himself.
Later on, in addition to a life in service to the royalist Cavendish family, Hobbs served
and as a mathematical tutor to the future King Charles II.
The leading Baconian in political economy, who was also fittingly a pioneer in statistics
and in the alleged science of political arithmetic, was the fascinating opportunist and adventurer,
Sir William Petty, 1623-1687.
Petty was the son of a poor rural cloth-worker from the county of Hampshire.
He learnt Latin at a country school and was put to sea as a cabin boy at thirteen.
When his leg was broken at sea, he was put ashore in France by the captain.
Petty got himself admitted to the Jesuit University at Ca by applying for admission in Latin.
There he received an excellent education in languages and mathematics, supporting himself
by tutoring and trading in custom jewelry. Soon Petty was off to Holland to study medicine.
There he became friendly with Dr. John Pell, Professor of Mathematics at Amsterdam. Traveling
to Paris to study anatomy, Petty was armed with an introduction by Pell to Thomas Hobbes.
Then Petty became Hobbes' secretary and research assistant, and from Hobbes imbibed Baconian
and Hobbesian empiricism, mechanism and absolutism.
Through Hobbes, Petty also joined advanced circles, including new scientists plus the
philosophic friends of science.
We must remember that science did not enjoy the professional specialization of the twentieth
century, and new scientific discoveries were often made in an atmosphere of scientists
surrounded by dilettantes philosophical cheerleaders.
Through Hobbes, Petit participated in the Parisian Circle of Father Marin Mersenne,
which included scientists such as Fermat and Gassendi, as well as philosopher-mathematicians
Pascal and Descartes.
After a year in Paris, Petty returned to England in 1646 to continue his medical studies at
Oxford.
Armed again with an introduction opening crucial doors from Professor Pell, Petty was embraced
by the man who has been called the Master of Ceremonies to the New Learning, the enthusiastic
Baconian, half-English Prussian immigrant from Poland and exile from Catholic rule,
Samuel Hartleib, 1599-1670 Pell was Hartleib's earliest disciple, and his first job had been
schoolmaster at a school run by the wealthy and well-connected Hartleib, whose father
had been merchant royal to the King of Poland. With Hartleib's backing, Petty's career at
Oxford now zoomed upward with incredible speed. Petty was welcomed into a circle of mathematicians
This group, which called itself the Invisible College, not only received petty warmly, but
they even met periodically at his lodgings, which, being at an apothecary's house, was
is convenient to scientific and alchemical experimentation in drugs.
Hardly did Petty become a fellow of Brasenose College in Oxford than he was made vice principal,
and hardly did he become a physician when he was made professor of anatomy.
Finally, Hartlib got his friend and protégé, Petty, made professor of music in 1651 at
The Gresham College in London, a new college dedicated to the experimental and mechanical
arts. Petty apparently taught the applied mathematics of music. At only 28, William
Petty had been vaulted to the top of the academic profession. The rapidity of Petty's climb
was undoubtedly aided by the fact that the new republican regime tossed out previously
Heartlib also wrote voluminously inductive histories of trade, especially agriculture,
helping to further the Baconian program.
Rutlib himself was a friend and disciple of his fellow Baconian, the mystical millennialist
Czech theologian and educationist Johann Amos Comenius, 1592-1670. Comenius, a bishop in
the pietist Hussite Moravian Church and an exile from Catholic rule, was employed by
by the Swedish government to organize its school system.
He went beyond Bacon to invent a new hermetic religious system, pansofism, which promised
to combine all the sciences in a mystical road to all knowledge.
Hartleib subscribed to these gnostic tenets, and he also followed Bacon in outlining his
and His Own New Utopia, which he called Macaria, 1641.
Hartlib and Comenius were the favorite philosophers and theoreticians of the Puritan country gentry,
the party of the Pims and the Cromwells.
Indeed, in the summer of 1641, when the country Puritans thought that they had successfully
After he achieved lasting rule under the King, Parliament eagerly brought Comenius to England,
and it was during the autumn that Hartleib published his Macaria, a welfare state utopia
he expected to institute in England.
Arrived in England, Comenius drew up his own plans for a pansofical reform or transformation
of the English Educational System, led by a pansofical college.
Comenius proclaimed that the last age of the world is drawing near, in which Christ and
His Church shall triumph, an age of enlightenment in which the earth shall be filled with the
knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.
The renewed outbreak of the Civil War put an end to plans for quiet social and educational
Reconstruction, and so Comenius returned to the continent of Europe the following year,
1642. But Hartleib and the others remained, and continued under munificent Puritan patronage.
During Cromwell's protectorate, these Baconians flourished, and Pell and other Hartleib disciples
were used by Cromwell as envoys to various Protestant countries in Europe.
One of Hartleib's favorite continuing projects was to try to found new colleges and institutions
to promote the new science.
One prospective donnie was the wealthy, aristocratic and much younger friend, the distinguished
physicist Robert Boyle, 1627-1691.
At one point, Hartleib tried to get Boyle to finance William Petty in compiling A History
of All Trades.
At another point, Petty, in his first published work at the age of 25, urged Hartleib to finance
a new college to advance real learning, which would be a gymnasium medicum or a college
of tradesmen.
This college, wrote Petty, would provide the best and most effectual opportunities and
means for writing a history of trades in perfection and exactness. Neither of these particular
projects was to pan out.
No sooner had William Petty reached the apex of academia in 1651, however, and before giving
his first lecture, than he left the university world for good. He was out to make a fortune,
And he saw his opportunity in the midst of Cromwell's devastating conquest and decimation
of Ireland.
A fellow Oxford Invisible, Jonathan Goddard, had gone off to become physician-in-chief
of Cromwell's army in Ireland and had returned two years later to the prestigious post of
Warden of Merton College, taking a two-year leave from Oxford.
Petty went to Ireland as Goddard's replacement. When Petty got to Ireland, he found a golden
opportunity to make his fortune. Cromwell had despoiled Irish lands and decided to pay
his soldiers and the financial supporters of his military campaign by handing out conquered
and confiscated Irish land. But to parcel out the land, it first had to be surveyed,
This task was being conducted by a Surveyor General, a friend of Petty and Hartleib, Dr.
Benjamin Worsley, a fellow physician who had published influential pamphlets that led
to the Navigation Act of 1652, a mercantilist measure for the subsidizing and privileging
of English shipping.
Petty, however, did not let friendship stand in his way.
Reaching Ireland in the autumn of 1652 and sizing up the situation, Petty launched a
propaganda campaign denouncing the alleged slowness of Worsley's survey and promising
to perform the task himself in a mere 13 months. Getting the job in February 1653, despite
the ferocious opposition of Worsley, Petty indeed completed the task on time.
With the huge sum of cash earned from this job, Petty set about accumulating ownership
of the confiscated Irish lands.
Some lands he acquired in lieu of cash payment, others he got by buying land claims from needy
English soldiers.
By 1660, William Petty had accumulated Irish landed estates totaling 100,000 acres, making
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.
By the late 1650s, Petty was back in London, serving for a time in parliament and renewing his friendships in scientific circles.
Back in England, Petty joined a Baconian-Hartlibian circle headed by another German émigré,
Theodor Haak, the organizing secretary of Comenius English Disciples.
Other members included Dr. Jonathan Goddard, now Protector Cromwell's personal physician,
and the famed architect Christopher Wren, whose first architectural work was a transparent
and the three-story beehive-like structure built for Hartleib.
The group met largely in the Oxford home of Cromwell's brother-in-law, John Wilkins,
whom the protector had made ruler of Oxford University.
The Baconians, it must be understood, though flourishing under Cromwell,
were never truly committed to any particular form of government.
Like in himself, they could flourish under an absolute monarchy.
Monarchy, republic, parliament, crown, church, all these forms of government made no particular
difference to these scientific, value-free, would-be rulers of the nation.
So long as the regime was sufficiently statist and at least nominally Protestant, the polity
could afford ample scope for the dreams of power and science held by these Baconian philosophers
and men of affairs. Hence Petty and his colleagues, always seekers of the main chance whatever
the government, were well placed when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660. Petty
himself was well received at the court of Charles II, who granted him a knighthood,
And in 1662, Petty's and his colleagues' Baconian dreams culminated when Petty became a founding
member of the newly chartered Royal Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge.
The Royal Society was specifically dedicated to the Baconian project of empirical observation
and experiment, first to the study of the natural world and technology, and then to
to the Study of Society.
Throughout his life, Petty remained an active member of the Royal Society, especially contributing
to its studies of the history of trades and technology.
Petty's own contribution, political arithmetic, or statistics, he saw as the application of
the empiricist Baconian program to the social world.
True to Petty's goal of empirical science, each of his studies was designed to promote
his own economic or political advancement.
His major publication, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, was published in 1662 and
went into three further editions in his lifetime.
Petty, however, was disappointed since the track did not lead to his hoped-for public
Office or Political Influence. Petty's later tracts were written but not published in his
lifetime, the others being published in 1690 or later after his death. This was because,
in the words of a generally admiring historian, they were written not for publication but
for circulation in the corridors of power or with a view to acquiring influence and
and Jobs, which he never managed to obtain. And even though Petty's daughter from a marriage
a few years later was to give rise to the aristocratic Shelburne and Lansdowne families,
Petty derived little enjoyment from his vast, ill-gotten lands in Ireland, since he had
to spend half his days in that country defending his claims from lawsuits from royalist claimants
or his lands from bandits who believed that he had despoiled their land.
As befitted a presumed experimental scientist, Petty claimed several important inventions,
only one of which, however, the double-hulled ship, ever came to fruition. He spent a great
deal of money building several versions of this ship, but they all suffered from the
What then was there about Sir William Petty that, despite his gifts, his seizure of the
main chance and his powerful friends, brought him up sharply against a glass ceiling that
that limited his political influence and his power at court, and that led even the King
of England to treat his discomfiture with malicious glee.
Apart from his sabotage of Benjamin Worsley, the problem was that Petty could not resist
the impolitic dig, whether he was wickedly mimicking the aristocracy at a party or was
was reproving His Majesty's policies in the very pamphlet he was writing to court the
King's favor.
Not being a gentleman by birth, Sir William could ill afford to act less than a gentleman
to his betters.
While publishing his treatise of taxes, Petty delivered several papers to the Royal Society
on the histories of the dying of cloth and shipping, advancing the Baconian History of
Trades Program. His major work, The Political Arithmetic, was written in the 1670s and
published posthumously in 1690. The goal was to show that England, far from suffering
from a decline as commonly believed, was actually wealthier than ever before. In The Political
Arithmetic, Petty claimed to eschew mere words and intellectual arguments and state only
Arguments of Sense, that is, derived from sensate facts of nature, which could all be
boiled down to number, weight and measure, a slogan which he enjoyed repeating on many
occasions.
Thus, at the end of an essay on algebra, Petty grandiloquently maintained that he had at
last applied algebra to other than purely mathematical matters, for example, to policy,
by the name of political arithmetic, by reducing many terms of matter to terms of number, weight
and measure in order to be handled mathematically.
In fact, there is virtually no mathematics in Petty.
What there is are statistics, loosely gathered and arbitrarily asserted, employing many hidden
assumptions to arrive at preordained ideological conclusions.
As William Letwin writes in his rewarding study of Petty, Petty's way with numbers,
here as always, was utterly cavalier. The facts, whatever they were, always had a congenial
way of upholding Petty's conclusions. Or, rather, Petty's factual assertions did, for
he was not averse to citing authorities mysterious, unknown and even nonexistent when he needed
Letwin then cites the conclusion of Major Greenwood, a modern historian of statistics.
It is not, I believe, too cynical to say that any calculation Petty made would have produced
war losses around 600,000.
At one point, Petty actually submits the justification for his arbitrary figures and assumptions
that they make no difference anyway, since the figures are not totally false, and therefore
can illustrate the method of arriving at knowledge. But fake illustrations, of course, are scarcely
an advertisement for the method of political arithmetic. Thus Petty tried to come to conclusions
pleasing to the king that England was gaining, not declining, in wealth by borrowing the
and the spurious precision of numbers and the prestige of science.
Sometimes his conclusions were so wildly optimistic as to abandon all sense,
as when he claimed that it was a very feasible matter for the King of England subjects
to gain the universal trade of the whole commercial world.
In the course of his discussions, Petty delivered himself of some economic theories,
Qualitative, not quantitative theories, we might add, in violation of his stated program.
They were either not very remarkable, urging the king not to levy taxes that are so high
they will lead to severe declines in output or employment, or incorrect, such as attributing
the value of goods not to the demand for them but to their costs of production.
Indeed, the quality of Petty's economic reasoning was generally that of a jejun mercantilist.
Like all early modern writers, with the exception of Botero, Petty was a naïve expansionist
on population.
The more people, the more income and output will increase.
Like mercantilists generally, Petty counseled and identified with the aristocratic power
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.
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.
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.
Petty, indeed, denounced these laborers as the vile and brutish part of mankind.
Sometimes Petty's imagination ran away with him, his zeal for increasing the laboring
population of England leading him to recommend, in the political arithmetic, forcibly moving
the bulk of the population of Scotland and Ireland to England, allegedly in their own
The 17th Century enthusiasm for the sciences, building upon the quasi-underground, age-old
numerological mysticism of the Hermetic and Kabbalah tradition, led to an arrogant frenzy
of enthusiasm for quantitative and mathematical study of social life as well among the scientists
and especially their cheering sections.
The eminent Harvard sociologist Peter Riem Sorokin has perceptively referred to this
frenzy from that day to the present as quantophrenia and metromania.
Thus, writes Sorokin, the mathematical study of psychosocial phenomena was especially cultivated
in the 17th and the 18th centuries. Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton and others began
to build a universal quantitative science, pentometrica or mathesis universi, with its
branches of psychometrica, ethicometrica and sociometrica, designed for investigating psychosocial
All truths are discovered only through measurement, and, without mathematics, human beings would
live as animals and beasts, were the mottos of the social physicists of these centuries.
William Letwin writes perceptively of this metaphronic phenomenon among the Baconians
of England during the Stuart Restoration period.
The scientific revolution of this period, writes Latwin, owed much of its vigor to faith,
the simple belief that many things in nature, as yet mysterious, could and should be measured
precisely.
Unfortunately, hand in hand with this revolutionary ideal went a devout but misplaced notion that
to measure and to understand were one and the same.
Letwin scientists believe that to cast a mathematical mantle over a problem was tantamount to solving
it.
As a result, Letwin goes on, the scientists united themselves in the royal society and
set off on an absolute orgy of measurement.
The virtuosi continued, endlessly and pointlessly, to record, catalogue and count.
The best minds of England squandered their talents in minutely recording temperature,
wind and the look of the skies hour by hour in various corners of the land.
Their efforts produced nothing more than the unusable records.
This impassioned energy was turned also to the measurement of economic and social dimensions
of various sorts.
The search for number, weight and measure was conducted in the happy belief that good
numbers would inevitably make for good policy.
Unfortunately, this quantophrenia and metrophrenia seems to have taken over the modern economics
profession.
Fortunately, for the development of economic thought, however, the quantophrenic enthusiasm
in the social sciences dribbled away after the effusion of some Baconian writers in the
in the 1690s. It would be nice to think that this decline was speeded up by the brilliant
and devastating satires directed against the Baconians in the 1720s by the great Tory libertarian
Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. In his classic Gulliver's Travels, Swift
Swift effectively lampooned the crazed scientists of Laputa and elsewhere who were putting into
effect what would now be called the Baconian Research Program.
Finally, in 1729, Swift followed up this satire with his famous modest proposal, what Letwin
justly calls the last word on political arithmetic as an instrument of social policy.
For Swift went after Petty, taking as his text Petty's claim that the more people the
better, and, in particular, Petty's serious proposal in his treatise of taxes to cure
Ireland's alleged cause of poverty underpopulation by urging government subsidies for births
among unmarried Irish women.
The subsidies were to be financed by a tax on all Irish, especially on Irish men.
The subsidies were only to be allowed if the woman kept records registering each father's
time of cohabitation and signed agreements by the father on the disposal of the children.
Swift's modest proposal satirized every aspect of petty style, from the solemnly avowed absurd
policy proposals to the fake precision of the numerological style.
Thus the modest proposal doggedly stated, The number of souls in this kingdom being
usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about 200,000
couples whose wives are breeders, from which number I subtract 30,000 couples who are able
to maintain their own children.
This being granted, there will remain 170,000 breeders.
After making due deductions for miscarriage or for children who die each year, Swift is
left with 120,000 children of poor parents annually born.
After demonstrating that there is no way by which these poor children can be reared or
employed, Swift concludes with his famous modest proposal, not liable to the least objection.
Being assured by a knowledgeable American in London that a young, healthy, well-nourished
child of one year old is a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed,
roasted, baked or boiled, Swift then goes on to demonstrate in the best value-free,
In a numerological, empiricist, petty-ite manner, the economic advantages of selling
100,000 children per annum to be eaten.
Most of the special pleading economic writers of the day ended their tracts professing no
personal gain and their devotion to the public wheel.
And so Swift ends his modest proposal accordingly.
I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the least personal interest in
endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good
of my country by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving
some pleasure to the rich.
I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny, the youngest being
I am 9 years old and my wife passed childbearing.