Malthus

Hamilton Historical, 2023

Robert Malthus’ 1803 Essay perpetuated multiple political myths about indigenous peoples, not because Malthus had malicious intent to speak about these people negatively, but because his views aligned comfortably with his greater society in metropolitan England. Whether the myth at hand was indigenous indolence, infanticide, or cannibalism, Mathus unconsciously supported them in his aim to create a universal human history where population was the solely important variable, similar to how his contemporary stadial theorists wrote their histories. Because his sources on indigenous peoples were popular, accepted, and respected in his society, Malthus’ discourse on indigenous peoples did not divert from his society’s norm. While Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population is no longer a reputable work of demography, it instead offers insight into how English society around the turn of the nineteenth-century viewed far-off people who lived in distant worlds.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1987

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

The temperature of our globe is rising, causing the population debate to heat up. The mounting stack of books in this field, to which I admit contributing several titles, often lacks historical perspective. Partisans of the two camps, Malthusians and Cornucopians, build Malthus up as hero or straw man, effacing the complexity of his arguments. Robert Mayhew, an intellectual historian and geographer, nicely points out in his new book, Malthus, how the man has been repeatedly truncated, his arguments airbrushed to suit the stock character demanded by friend and foe alike. Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was a remarkable, radical achievement. Christian theology and Enlightenment rationalism shared little, but shook hands on the subject of population. Christianity cleaved to the 'God Will Provide ' Cornucopianism of Scripture. Enlightenment rationalists yoked faith in man's ingenuity with a vision of human perfectibility and boundless possibility. Malthus perceived things differently. A country clergyman, he was struck by the hardship and premature deaths of commoners in his rural Surrey parish. Against the utopianism of a Condorcet or Godwin, Malthus counselled realism. Where Enlightenment intellectuals lived comfortable lives ensconced in a world of abstractions and ideals, Malthus focused squarely on building a picture from the ground up based on detailed quantifiable evidence. The philosophes ignored the masses, but Malthus invited them into history and urged that their suffering should guide social policy.

The many editions of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population were influential throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. They caused heated debate about both economics and social policy, and could be said to be the foundation of modern demography. Less attention has been paid, however, to the theology presented in the last two chapters of the first edition. This is surprising since the theology is unusual, controversial and, on the face of it, central to the work. In this paper I examine Malthus’s intentions in writing these last two chapters and the relationship between them and the rest of his argument. I also consider whether the theology was antecedent or consequent to Malthus’s principle of population, and the causes of their excision from later editions of the Essay.

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European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

2017

Thomas Malthus has become, over more than two centuries, one of the most frequently referenced economists with regard to demographics. As the author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), he was the main disseminator of one of the most intriguing theories of population growth. His thinking has influenced many – from contemporaries, such as David Ricardo – to most of the “neo-Malthusian” schools of thought from the mid1960s to the present day. This paper addresses some aspects of population theory discussed prior to the Essay, and the impact that this work had – with respect to both its influence and the critiques and replicas that his work suffered throughout the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The paper’s purpose is to draw up guidelines for a more precise interpretation of Malthus’ contribution to demographic, economic and, finally, social thought.

He gave a wrong theory on the growth of population, which was quite soon replaced by a correct one by Verlhurst. But he is remembered till today, his name is known to all. Whereas nobody knows the name of Verlhurst, he is totally forgotten even among the academics. Earlier he was at least referred to in the textbooks on Degree Statistics. Now there also his theory is taught without a mention of his name. Hearing me say so, you may feel perplexed, or rather, may be shocked. “Is it really true? How can this happen? Surely there is some mystery behind this.” Yes, there is. In science sometimes even a wrong theory opens up a new lead in solving some long-unsolved enigma. Later this wrong theory is rejected, but the man who had propounded it and showed thereby a new vista is remembered as a contributor in the development of the theory. Let us take Berzelius, for instance, from the history of chemistry. He had suggested a wrong theory about the correlation of number of molecules of a gas ...

This is a critique of a widespread tendency to use the label 'neb-Malthusian' to deny or evade the threat from overpopulation.