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

Abbé Saint-Pierre and the “Quantifying Spirit” 24
Malebranche circle, guided by l’Hôpital and Varignon, began to systematically explore the new
science of analytical mechanics suggested by Newton’s work.
A detailed history of analytical mechanics in France is not necessary for understanding
Saint-Pierre’s political science. 51 Instead, the general features which shaped his quantitative
approach to political science can be isolated. The emphasis upon number, while apparently
obvious, is in fact the most significant. The early efforts by Colbert and others to amass
“statistics,” or state information, had of course been rooted in an epistemological belief in the
value of empirical, scientific fact gathering. But these efforts were not necessarily rooted in a
conception of quantitative data collection or in an epistemological belief that number and
mathematics were powerful tools for satisfying these utilitarian agendas. When asked to do a
new census of their region, for example, as royal intendants were often asked to do under
Colbert, many responded by giving narrative accounts which highlighted the natural features of
the region, its people, and customs along with discursive presentations of the region’s major
resources, industries, and agricultural products. In presenting the empirical features of France in
this non-quantitative way, moreover, the intendants were on the whole fulfilling the expectations
of the ministers in charge of these initiatives. 52
As the seventeenth century waned, however, a new interest in quantification began to
take hold within the fledgling world of statistics. The pioneering work of William Petty in this
regard has been well documented, and his “political arithmetic” as he called it did circulate in
France and exert an influence on people like Saint-Pierre. But France also had its own
indigenous tradition of quantitative statistical science even if it has not been as thoroughly
studied. The historical obscurity of French quantitative statistics stems largely from the fact that
the practitioners were rarely book-writing savants but instead royal administrators serving in the