Echoing the insights of historians of science and medicine on the shifting boundaries of disciplinary knowledge, historians as well as literary scholars have investigated practices, ideas or metaphors that touch on several fields. Literary historian Anne Vila, for instance, has argued that ‘sensibility’ functioned as a ‘bridging concept’ during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century bridging concepts, according to Vila, ‘blended biological, psychological, and social interests’, and, in the case of sensibility at least, ‘created intriguing alignments between diverse discursive fields – for example, philosophical medicine and the philosophical novel’.91 Joseph Vogl, in his reflection
on the emergence of ‘homo economicus’, has identified ‘population’ as an object of
90 Emma Spary, ‘Political, Natural and Bodily Economies’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. by
Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 178–96. See also Serna, Comme les bêtes, pp. 14-15.
91 Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, p. 258. The concept is borrowed from Jordanova, Sexual Visions,
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knowledge – or, we might say, a bridging concept – that lies at the heart of several eighteenth-century fields of knowledge, from political economy, to the life sciences, to medicine.92 The concept of ‘population’, of particular importance in the second half of this dissertation, constitutes a good example of the ways in which eighteenth century fields of knowledge traverse contemporary disciplinary boundaries and of the way in which scholars have dealt with this problem.
Vogl’s insights into the concept of ‘population’ follow Foucault’s important lectures only recently published in English as Security, Territory, Population.93 Foucault argued that the concept of the ‘population’ as we understand now emerged in the late seventeenth century as both an object of knowledge and of political power. Foucault theorised this shift as a shift from ‘sovereign power’ to ‘biopower’; he argued that older technologies of government based on sovereign power and thus the right of the ruler to determine the details of his subjects’ lives (and, in extreme cases, to decide their death) was replaced by a theory and practice of government based on the ‘natural’ body of the population.94 This natural body designated a specific kind of collective, defined not by, say, a social contract or a feudal hierarchy, but by its ‘naturalness’; the population, Foucault argued, was no longer considered simply a collection of people who had to obey the sovereign, but a collection of bodies with their own desires and their own natural laws. The ‘discovery’ of the population in this period was essential to allow for a transition from older forms of governmental rule (based on the power of the sovereign) to modern liberal forms which target the biological life of subjects through individual disciplinary measures. At the same time, through various new regulatory technologies – the rise of statistics being the most obvious one – this disciplined individual is bound to a collective whole in need of constant observation, adjustment and regulations.95 The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘discoverers’
92 Vogl, Poetologie. Ted McCormick, ‘Population’, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. by Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 25–45., pp. 78-85.
93 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
94 Foucault, Security.
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of the population were aware, of course, that individuals differed from one another in significant ways; however, Foucault argues, they identified one constant that united all individual subjects: desire, understood as the individual’s pursuit of self-interest rather than as the mark of spiritual corruption.96 Desire – or what eighteenth-century writers called the passions – came to be seen as a ‘natural’, and inevitable, constituent factor of the human being; if the sovereign ensured that this desire could be played out, it would ‘naturally’ lead to the production of the collective interest. While desire itself was a natural given, the techniques governments adopted in order to allow for the productive, free play of desire were not. For Foucault, this notion of the naturalness of desire (and of the population) gave rise to a notion of government that was radically new. Whereas the sovereign according to the old ‘ethico-juridical’ conception was seen to have to supress the passions, now the task of government was to allow the passions to be channelled in productive ways.
Foucault’s approach to population seen as concept contrasts with the works of scholars who seek to understand the reasons for the so-called ‘demographic revolution;’ of the eighteenth century. In contrast to Foucault and those who follow his understanding of ‘population’ (which is part of his theory of biopower) as a problem and technology of new form of government during the eighteenth century, much scholarship has taken the notion of ‘population’ as given. Demography – a discipline which only emerged through the acceptance of population as a ‘natural’ concept – is a case in point here. Thus, (mostly French) historical demographers apply the methods of modern demography to study populations of the past, calculating the size of the population in the eighteenth century.97 Other scholars seeking the reasons
for eighteenth-century population growth are more accurately described as historians of demography, such as James C. Riley who concludes his study on Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (1985) by proposing that a new emphasis on the part of eighteenth-century ‘demographers’ and physicians on people’s
96 See especially, Foucault, Security, pp. 71-74.
97 Jacques Dupâquier, Histoire de la population française, 4 vols (Paris: PUF, 1988); Marcel Reinhard,
‘La population de la France et sa mesure, de l’Ancien Régime au Consulat’, Contributions à l’histoire démographique de la révolution française, 2 (1965), 259–74.
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environment led to reduced mortality and new attitudes towards nuptiality and fertility.98
Historians of eighteenth-century thought and literary scholars, influenced by the cultural turn, have begun to focus not on empirical reasons for population growth, but on what for eighteenth-century observers themselves was the central problem of their century: depopulation. As Sylvana Tomaselli remarked in an essay on the views of Hume and Montesquieu on population growth and decline, population ‘impinges on nearly every important aspect of the Enlightenment's evaluation of the morality, manners, and mores of the Ancien Régime and of modern commercial society more generally speaking.’99 Even though historical demographers have since demonstrated
that France’s populations number actually increased over the course of the century, philosophes, state administrators and other thinkers were convinced that the French population was in decline, which they associated with a decline in France’s prosperity as a whole. As literary scholar Carol Blum has shown, these thinkers deplored, often in fictional form, what they considered France’s fatally flawed policies in areas such as marriage and fertility, blaming, for instance, the Church’s celibacy laws for the country’s assumed depopulation.100
Both historical demographers and historians of ideas as well as literary scholars agree that one area where knowledge of populations was both developed and applied was medicine. Historians of medicine have thus investigated how doctors’ care for the health and longevity of individual bodies developed into what we now know as public health: medicine turned from caring for (often privileged) individual bodies
98 James C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (Durham, NC:
Carolina Academic Press, 1985). More recent studies using digital humanities methods to demonstrate the rise of demographic thinking come from scholars at the Institut national de démographie: Christine Théré and Jean-Marc Rohrbasser, ‘L’entrée en usage du mot «population» au milieu du XVIIIe siècle’, in Le cercle de Vincent de Gournay, ed. by Loïc Charles, Frédéric Lefebvre, and Christine Théré (Paris: INED, 2011), pp. 133–160; Christine Théré and Jean-Marc Rohrbasser, ‘L’emploi du terme "population" dans l’Encyclopédie’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 31-32 (2002), 103– 122. See also the older account of Joseph John Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Wage and Population Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942).
99 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Moral Philosophy and Population Questions in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Population and Development Review, 14 (1988), 7–29 (p. 8).
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to a concern with the population and all its strata.101 As Sean Quinlan has shown in
particular, the issue of depopulation greatly concerned medical writers, as they became convinced that population growth would lead to increased national wealth and the well-being of its inhabitants.102 Physicians viewed health and sickness no longer just
as a matter of individual constitution, and began to turn to what we now call demography in order to understand the condition of the body politic.103
Historians of science have focused also on the development of statistical methods for counting populations.104 Andrea Rusnock, for instance, has analysed the
development of numerical methods for counting populations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and England. On the basis of her discussion of the comparative development of medical and political statistics, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as ‘political arithmetic’, she thus argues that ‘the modern concept of the population and its measurement were mutually constitutive.’105
Eric Brian, in a monograph focusing primarily on Condorcet, has shown how mathematicians working at the Academy of Sciences in the late eighteenth century
101 Useful overviews of the historiography of population health can be found in Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1999), especially 1-8; Olivier Faure, ‘The Social History of Health in France: A Survey of Recent Developments’, Social History of Medicine, 3.3 (1990), 437–451.
102 Quinlan, Great Nation. 103 Riley, Population.
104 In addition to Rusnock’s work, quoted above, see Ted McCormick, ‘Population’, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. by Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 25–45; Jean-Marc Rohrbasser, ‘Comment compter la population ? La méthode du multiplicateur aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Population et sociétés, 2005, 1–4; Jean-Marc Rohrbasser and Christine Théré, ‘Antoine Deparcieux (1703–1768) and Demographic Data Collection’, The History of the Family, Early European Population Statistics and Censuses, 9.1 (2004), 115–22; Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Karin Johannisson, ‘Society in Numbers: The Debate over Quantification in Eighteenth-Century Political Economy’, in
The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, ed. by Tore Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 343–61; Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Stuart J. Woolfe, ‘Towards the History of the Origins of Statistics: France, 1789-1815’, in State and Society in France, 1789-1815, ed. by Stuart J. Woolfe and Jean-Claude Perrot (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1984); Fernand Faure, ‘The Development and Progress of Statistics in France’, in The History of Statistics: Memoirs to Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the American Statistical Society (New York: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 219–329.
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developed methods that could be used to count populations. Particularly when compared to modern demographers, however, eighteenth-century thinkers were rather uninterested in counting people, a preoccupation that would develop more fully in the nineteenth century.106 As scholars have shown, in the period that concerns us here,
writers struggled to define the concept, as much as to develop numerical methods for representing it; the ‘population’ was not a given, but a concept that was constructed in the Enlightenment across different fields of knowledge and practices.
While historians of science and medicine have analysed the importance of mathematical methods for population statistics, this dissertation looks at strategies for governing living bodies, rather than the submissive souls found in pre-Enlightenment treatises on the politics of absolutism.107 The notion of the population was, however,
still new and rather abstract in the eighteenth century. Writers and readers were still struggling to fill it with meaning and put it into practice. Social insects were particularly useful for this endeavour, as they appeared in large groups that, as in the case of harmful pests or useful bees, often proved challenging to control. Ideas about government of collectives, as well as the notion of population, once it became current in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, belong to what we would now consider political economy, but in the period of the Enlightenment they were not confined to writings that might be classified as such. This does not mean that political economists were necessarily indebted to observers of insects or that one field exerted a linear influence on the other; rather, by looking at the question of population in texts where they are not commonly sought, we can identify a common set of concerns that transcend modern disciplinary boundaries.