The Abbé de Saint-Pierre and the Emergence of the 'Quantifying ...

Abbé Saint-Pierre and the “Quantifying Spirit” 16
for a revolution whereby the reign of priests and superstition would be replaced by the reign of
science and facts. Here Saint-Pierre frames his own approach to political science in similar
terms, calling for an escape from ignorance and barbarism and movement into Enlightenment.
Key to this revolution for him is a new imperative toward attentive observation, disciplined
record-keeping, and scrupulous restraint from speculation. Baconian science was insistent that
the production of reliable knowledge depended first and foremost on the prior production of a
reliable archive of facts, and Saint-Pierre likewise conceives of his political science as built upon
the same foundation.
By framing the epistemology of his political science in these terms, Saint-Pierre was
echoing the larger epistemological assumptions of the new empirical physics. He was also
following in the footsteps of a previous generation of political thinkers who had likewise seen in
Baconianism a new framework for modernizing the practice of statecraft. In France, the ministry
of Jean-Baptiste Colbert which began in 1661 was noteworthy for its attempt to make factgathering
a fundamental practice of state. It was Colbert who sponsored the creation of the Royal
Academy of Sciences in 1666, and even if the institution was never the pure corps of utilitarian
state servants that the minister hoped for, it was an important cog in the minister’s practice of
scientific statecraft. The Royal Observatory founded in 1673 was similarly conceived to foster
the accumulation of utilitarian astronomical data for such state projects as navigation, mapmaking,
and civil engineering projects like roads, canals, and bridges. Other Colbertian projects,
such as his new population censuses or his attempts to rationally scrutinize the fiscal and legal
systems, also speak to his interest in reforming monarchy through a reorientation toward the
accumulation and application of scientific facts. 38