Ted McCormick. William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. xv, 347. $99.00

This is a long overdue attempt to place Sir William Petty and his “political arithmetic” in the context in which they belong by exploring the aspirations and mental tools that stemmed from Petty's intellectual and cultural background. In particular, it argues for the significance for Petty of the ethos of control that he derived from the ideas of Francis Bacon. For Petty the objectives of political arithmetic “were emphatically transformative” (p. 301); as a result he used quantitative data argumentatively and, if necessary, impressionistically to make a case. He thus lacked the stress on disinterestedness and precision that characterized such successors as Charles Davenant, who in many ways reinterpreted political arithmetic for the Augustan age. This also helps to explain the somewhat paradoxical nature of Petty's output, which comprised relatively few major treatises and instead a plethora of more...