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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $252.00

Format:
Hardback
352 pp.
5 b/w halftones, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199547890

Publication date:
September 2009

Imprint: OUP UK


William Petty

And the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic

Ted McCormick

William Petty (1623-1687) was a key figure in the English colonization of Ireland, the institutionalization of experimental natural philosophy, and the creation of social science.

Examining Petty's intellectual development and his invention of 'political arithmetic' against the backdrop of the European scientific revolution and the political upheavals of Interregnum and Restoration England and Ireland, this book provides the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Petty based on a thorough examination not only of printed sources but also of Petty's extensive archive and pattern of manuscript circulation. It is also the first fully contextualized study of what political arithmetic - widely seen as an ancestor of modern social and economic analysis - was originally intended to do.

Ted McCormick traces Petty's education among French Jesuits and Dutch Cartesians, his early work with the 'Hartlib Circle' of Baconian natural philosophers, inventors, and reformers in England, his involvement in the Cromwellian conquest and settlement of Ireland, and his engagement with both science and the politics of religion in the Restoration. He argues that Petty's crowning achivement, political arithmetic, was less a new way of analysing economy or society than a new 'instrument of government' that applied elements of the new science - a mechanical worldview, a corpuscularian theory of matter, and a Baconian stress on empirical method and the transformative purposes of natural philosophy - to the creation of industrious and loyal populations. Finally, he examines the transformation Petty's program of social engineering, after his death, into an apparently apolitical form of statistical reasoning.

Readership : All those interested in seventeenth century intellectual history, the history of Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland, and the history of political economy.

Introduction: William Petty and Political Arithmetic
1. From Romsey to Paris
2. The Making of a Virtuoso
3. Surveying Ireland
4. Science and Policy in the Restoration
5. The Transmutation of the Irish
6. Corpuscles, Colonies, and Kingdoms
7. Political Arithmetic in Circulation
8. Death and Afterlife
Conclusion: From Political Arithmetic to Political Economy
Bibliography
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Ted McCormick is Assistant Professor of History at Concordia University, Montreal, having received his PhD from Columbia University.

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Special Features

  • The first comprehensive intellectual biography of William Petty based upon detailed research not only of printed sources but also his extensive unpublished archive.
  • The first fully contextualized study of what Petty's crowning achievement, political arithmetic, was originally intended to do.
  • Argues that political arithmetic was not only a new way of analysing economy or society but a new 'instrument of government' for the creation of industrious and loyal populations.
  • Examines the transformation of Petty's program of social engineering, after his death, into an apparently apolitical form of statistical reasoning.