Abstract
William Petty (1623–87) has long been recognized as one of the founders of political economy—“one of the first to see through the nature of value,” as Karl Marx put it. To do so, in Petty’s case, also meant entangling early modern political economy in poiēsis: in imaginative fabrication and mental image-breaking. This essay is concerned with Petty’s theorization of surplus or “supernumerary” population and with the enduring motif of a “useless pyramid upon Salisbury Plain” that was its superfluous product. The double status of Petty’s supernumerary labor, at once evacuated into “labor pure and simple” and made to reoccupy the ideologically charged and apocalyptic “temple-work” of his more zealous contemporaries, allows it to register the dynamism of capitalism as a system: as a “moving contradiction” coupling necessity and nonnecessity.
