State Studies (German Staatskunde, Staatswissenschaft) - a branch of knowledge that emerged in Germany in the second half of the XVII century. as a kind of monographic description of the “sights” of the state: titles, emblems, government, laws, territory, population, religion, customs, etc. [1] . State studies also call a descriptive school that characterized states and what affects their well-being, without quantitative data, which at first simply did not exist [1] [2] .
Content
History
Herman Conring (1606-1671) was the pioneer of state studies as a university discipline. The aim of the science was that he considered teaching the understanding of the causes of state-important phenomena, divided into four groups: material - description of the territory and population, formal - political structure, final (targeted) - welfare of the state and its citizens, administrative - state management, its apparatus (officials, army, etc.). These four parts predetermined the development of demography , political geography , budget statistics and administrative statistics [1] .
Gottfried Achenval (1719-1772) coined the term " statistics ". He created a school that fully dominated Europe until the middle of the 19th century. Due to the lack of numerical data, the statistics were initially descriptive.
Johann Süssmilch (1707-1767) became the first real statistician in Germany.
Anton Friedrich Buching (1724–-1793) opposed Achenval, defending statistical descriptions not by countries, but by research objects (population, armed forces, agriculture, trade, etc.). He proposed the concept of population density as a factor of economic growth. He believed that foreign trade compensates for the shortcomings of natural resources and allows integrating the economic life of different countries.
To ensure the accuracy of data on landmarks, the Danish scientist I. P. Anhersen (1700 - 1765) proposed to bring them into tables, which led to the appearance of a tabular direction in government studies . However, the tables included mostly non-numerical, but verbal data.
The impulse to the collection of quantitative information gave the Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm II (1744 - 1797) a passion to counting. According to his decree, numerous data were summarized in the “Historical Tables”, but they were secret.
German State Professor A.F.V. In addition (1753 - 1833) from the data tables moved to the graphic images. In the “Map of European Products” published by him in 1782, the places of extraction and production of various products were designated. In the book On the Size and Population of All European States (1785), A. Krome published tables on the area, size, population density of states, and a comparative map on which relations between states on the above parameters were depicted using squares. This was the beginning of the use of cartograms and comparative planar diagrams for displaying statistical data.
The disciple and follower of Aachenval Augustus Ludwig Schlötzer (1735-1809) developed the ideas of state studies, proposing the segmentation of the statistical study for observation, grouping, summary and analysis. He critically assessed the collected data, demanding from them accuracy and reliability. He considered statistics as a means of enlightenment and the fight against despotism, for which he published information about military spending in different countries in the Statistical Journal in Göttingen , expecting people to see in huge amounts the harm of war.
If Schlötzer was a representative of descriptive statistics reflecting the current state of the state, then the French Pesce and Donnan offered to study the productive forces and potential capabilities of countries.
The most valuable achievements of the descriptive school were the development of a set of indicators and the creation of a special system for collecting statistical data on mass phenomena.
Russian school
A humanities scholar, a connoisseur of fifteen languages, Augustus Ludwig Schlötzer realized the ideas of his teacher Achenval not only in Germany, but also in Russia, where he spent eight years (1761 - 1767), becoming a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1769). In Russia, he participated in the development of exemplary samples of registration by parish priests of deaths, births, marriages; in compiling sample lists in which the dead were distributed by age and cause of death. In 1764, the proposed system was introduced in Petersburg, and then in all the provinces. According to the 1764 data, Schlözer built the first mortality table for St. Petersburg.
One of the first known Russian works on descriptive statistics is considered to be the “Statistical Table” from the book of the scientist of the Moscow University, I.A. Heime "Experience in drawing statistics of the most important states on their current state" (Moscow, 1821) [1] .
In pre-revolutionary Russia, statehood was represented by a whole pleiad of scholars: B. N. Chicherin , K. D. Kavelin , M. F. Vladimirsky-Budanov , F. V. Taranovsky, and others [3] .
Statehood was the first form of systematization of accumulated dispersed data about society, which were initially useful to princely dynasties that ruled in small German states. These studies have found a logical continuation in university science. He began teaching the new discipline in 1660 at the University of Helmstedt, Hermann Konring. He considered each state in itself, in its present state, scooped from geography, recent history and public law, the data that were most important for the political institutions of the state.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 State . ekonomstat.ru. The appeal date is December 8, 2018.
- ↑ Demographic Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M .: Soviet encyclopedia. Chief Editor D.I. Valenteus 1985.
- ↑ Mikhail Alekumov. Russian world. New book E. Bondareva / Orthodoxy Ru . www.pravoslavie.ru (1.03.2013). The appeal date is December 8, 2018.