ABSTRACT
William Petty's work on so-called political economy can be seen as an attempt to make human life a part of the natural order, so as to use the tools of the natural sciences to understand and, potentially, control human society. The chief beneficiary of such work was of course the state, as Petty knew and as Francis Bacon some decades earlier would have realised. For Bacon, control of nature was a legitimate aim of the state, and any extension of the natural sciences to human society itself would surely have chimed with his purposes very well. It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty.
