Political Arithmetic's 18th Century Histories: Quantification in Politics, Religion, and the Public Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Seventeenth‐and 18th‐century political arithmetic – the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of quantitative demographic information for various political, economic, scientific, and scholarly purposes – has attracted increasing scholarly attention since the mid‐1990s. Long understood as an early or proto‐social scientific discipline, anticipatory of modern economics and statistical demography, political arithmetic has emerged from recent studies (informed by new approaches to state‐formation, contextual intellectual history, constructivist history of science, and work on biopolitical governmentality) as a more variegated, less straightforwardly modern and, notably, less secular phenomenon. These developments have exposed the teleological nature and other limitations of older disciplinary approaches, but new studies have neither wholly shed nor replaced older definitions of what constituted political arithmetic during the long eighteenth century. This article surveys the state of the field and argues that a comprehensive history of political arithmetic's multiple roles and meanings during the long eighteenth century must take a much wider range of contributors and publics into account.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".