PETTY, William.
Political Arithmetick, or a Discourse concerning the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings.
London: Robert Clavel and Henry Mortlock, 1691.
$6,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152555
+$500
Second Edition, 1691, of Sir William Petty's Political Arithmetick; a Foundational Work in the History of Statistics and Economics
Rare second edition of Petty's pioneering work in the history of statistics and economics, the first to bring quantitative and statistical method to the study of political economy. Octavo, bound in full calf, rebacked, morocco spine label lettered in gilt, gilt ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands. In very good condition. An exceptionally clean example of this landmark in the birth of modern economics, demography, and statistics.
Sir William Petty was an English physician, surveyor, economist, and founding fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the most original minds of the seventeenth century. Rising from humble origins to become a professor of anatomy and later the surveyor of Ireland, where he carried out the Down Survey, the first systematic mapping of the country, he brought a scientist’s insistence on measurement to the questions of government and economy. In Political Arithmetick, written in the 1670s and circulated in manuscript before its posthumous publication in 1690, he proposed to reason about the state not through rhetoric but through data, expressing himself, as he wrote, in terms of number, weight, and measure. The method he called political arithmetic laid the groundwork for the modern disciplines of statistics, demography, and economics, and influenced generations of thinkers from Gregory King to Adam Smith.
Political Arithmetick, or a Discourse concerning the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings.
$6,500.00
In Stock