Early Modern Population Theory: A Reassessment

THE VIEW THAT DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION must be understood as part of a wider ideational change in Western culture, directly inspired by earlier philosophical developments, has often been asserted, most recently by Lesthaeghe (1983) and Chesnais (1986). Sustained reexamination of this philosophical background, however, has yet to be attempted. At first glance, the assertion may seem puzzling, at least if it is taken to refer to writings specifically on population. While sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century treatises on the nature of man, human society, and government may have done much to encourage a general revolution in social attitudes in later centuries, their specifically demographic content often seems minimal, and their generally pronatalist character appears to run against the trend of later developments. This impression, however, may be the effect of dated historiography. A customary and seldom-criticized approach to the history of population theory, now almost a century old, has been to lump together all writings before 1800 as pre-Malthusian and to consider them chiefly for their anticipation of Malthus or of the controversies he aroused (e.g., Stangeland, 1904; Spengler, 1942; Gonnard, 1923; Bonar, 1931). Or, the history of population as a problem in Western thought is viewed as a long process of progressive refinement: the many ingenious measures of the political arithmeticians are seen as flawed by the poor data, moral preoccupations, and primitive mathematics with which they worked; the rise of modern population theory, analysis, and statistics appears then as a gradual shedding of misconceptions as past writers came closer and closer to the concepts we use today (e.g., Lorimer, 1959; Pearson, 1978). These perspectives are evidently suspect on grounds of anachronism: they judge early population inquiry in terms of later developments of which past writers could not have been aware. More fundamentally, they have resulted in a fragmentation of our understanding of the way population inquiry develops, in three senses.