SÜSSMILCH, JOHANN

(1707–1767)

Known as the father of German demography, Johann Peter Süssmilch was the eldest child of a Berlin brewer and corn merchant. When he was 17, he began medical studies, but, under parental pressure, changed to law at Halle. Believing that he had a religious vocation, he registered at the Faculty of Divinity. There he was advised to read Canon William Derham's Physico-Theology (1713, 1726), which aroused his interest in population matters, albeit viewed from a theological perspective. In 1728, he moved to Jena to study philosophy, oriental languages, mathematics, and physics, and to complete his thesis. He was ordained in 1736. The following year he married, eventually having 10 children, among whom 9 survived. After a short stay in a Brandenburg parish, Süssmilch was called to the Court of Prussia by Frederick the Great. He served as a chaplain during the Silesian war in 1740 and in 1742 was named pastor primarius in the Petrikirche of Berlin. The first edition of his massive treatise Die Göttliche Ordnung (full title translation, The Divine Order in the Transformations of the Human Race as Demonstrated through Birth, Death, and the Multiplication of the Same) in 1741 gained him entry to the Royal Academy of Sciences. Süssmilch, who was financially independent, spent the following years supplementing his statistical documentation and presenting several historical, linguistic, and demographic papers to the Academy. He was also in an economic position to publish two additional, greatly enlarged, editions of his magnum opus (1761–1762,1765). He died as a result of a stroke in 1767.

This "God-intoxicated man," influenced by German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who wanted to reconcile Calculation and Revelation, asserted that beyond the chaotic appearance of vital events, humankind obeys a constant, general, beautiful, and harmonious order. This divine order is rendered visible only for large numbers of individuals observed over wide regions and long periods, with the help of the theory of probabilities. Süssmilch did not wish to give a precise numerical account of this order, but, rather, to show that the arithmetic of Life and Death was ruled by the hidden or invisible hand of the Supreme Political Arithmetician. By articulating Political Arithmetic (like English political economist William Petty [1623–1687]) and Physico-Theology, demography, as a faithful ancilla theologiae, gave birth to a kind of demographic theology.

From a scientific point of view, Süssmilch was not an innovator, but rather a compiler. He did not make any major technical discovery, nor did he make the most of the methodological possibilities of his time. But his aim was different. He was prepared to set aside "all those algebraic calculations," for, in Süssmilch's opinion, Faith did not need any data. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge, he wrote the first general treatise of quantitative and qualitative demography in any language, contributing to the triumph of Anglo-Dutch political arithmetic over the German Staatenkunde, or descriptive statistics. At the end of the eighteenth century, Süssmilch's theory of divine order gave way to that of the natural order, and positivist thought displaced theological argument. After a period of relative oblivion, Süssmilch's work experienced an unexpected revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The religious and philosophical origins of demography were again of interest to the scientific community; Süssmilch's contribution was reappraised, and sometimes exaggerated. If it cannot be compared with the mathematical contributions to demographic thinking of figures such as Condorcet Pierre-Simon Laplace, or Antoine Cournot, Süssmilch certainly is the indispensable intermediary linking the political arithmetic of John Graunt to the population theorizing of T. R. Malthus (1766–1834) and Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). As such, Süssmilch's work represents a major step forward in the history of demography.

See also: Demography, History of; Population Thought, History of.

bibliography

selected works by johann sÜssmilch.

Süssmilch, Johann Peter. 1983. English Translation of Sections of the 4th Edition of Die göttliche Ordnung Population and Development Review 9:521–529.

——. 1998 [1741]. Ordre divin dans les changements de l'espèce humaine, démontré par la naissance, la mort et la propagation de celle-ci, trans. and ann. Jean-Marc Rohrbasser. (Die göttliche Ordnung in den Veränderungen des menschlichen Geschlechts, aus der Geburt, dem Tode und der Fortpflanzung desselben erwiesen) Paris: Institut National d'Études Démographiques.

selected works about johann sÜssmilch.

Birg, Herwig, ed. 1986. Ursprünge der Demographie in Deutschland, Leben und Werk Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707–1767). Institut für Bevölkerungsforschung und Sozialpolitik. Bielefeld/Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag.

Hax, Herbert, ed. 2001. Über Johann Peter Süssmilchs "Göttliche Ordnung." Vademecum zu dem Deutschen Klassiker der Bevölkerungswissenschaft, annotated reprint of the 1st edition. Düsseldorf, Germany: Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen.

Hecht, Jacqueline, ed. 1979–1984. Johann Peter Süssmilch 1707–1767: L'"Ordre divin" aux origines de la démographie…, partial annotated translation of the 2nd edition, 3 vols. Paris: Institut national d'études démographiques.

Jacqueline Hecht