10. Mercantilism and Freedom in England from the Tudors to the Civil War (continued)

0:006. 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.

1:05Essentially, 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.

1:55Essentially, 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.

2:46The 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.

3:34He 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.

4:20In 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.

5:09And 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.

6:00For 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.

6:49Manliness 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.

7:52The 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.

8:56The 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.

9:46And 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.

10:40Like 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.

11:31The 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.

12:18He 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.

13:13To 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.

13:59In 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.

14:57In 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.

15:45On 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.

16:377. 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.

17:39This 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.

18:28Later 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.

19:17Petty 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.

20:05Through 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.

20:57Armed 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.

22:17Hardly 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.

23:27Rutlib 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.

24:21Hartlib 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.

25:08Comenius 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.

25:59One 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.

26:45This 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.

27:43Petty 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.

28:32Petty, 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.

29:23By 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.

30:14Other 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.

31:10So 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.

31:59The 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.

32:49His 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.

34:07As 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.

35:05Apart 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

36:29occasions. 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.

37:14As 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.

38:01At 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.

38:56In 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.

39:46The 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.

40:50Petty, 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.

41:49The 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.

42:52William 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.

43:38As 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.

44:31Unfortunately, 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.

45:28Finally, 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.

46:14The 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.

47:04This 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.

48:07Most 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.