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An Essay on the Principle of Population

By thomas robert malthus.

There are two versions of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population . The first, published anonymously in 1798, was so successful that Malthus soon elaborated on it under his real name. * The rewrite, culminating in the sixth edition of 1826, was a scholarly expansion and generalization of the first.Following his success with his work on population, Malthus published often from his economics position on the faculty at the East India College at Haileybury. He was not only respected in his time by contemporaneous intellectuals for his clarity of thought and willingness to focus on the evidence at hand, but he was also an engaging writer capable of presenting logical and mathematical concepts succinctly and clearly. In addition to writing principles texts and articles on timely topics such as the corn laws, he wrote in many venues summarizing his initial works on population, including a summary essay in the Encyclopædia Britannica on population.The first and sixth editions are presented on Econlib in full. Minor corrections of punctuation, obvious spelling errors, and some footnote clarifications are the only substantive changes. * Malthus’s “real name” may have been Thomas Robert Malthus, but a descendent, Nigel Malthus, reports that his family says he did not use the name Thomas and was known to friends and colleagues as Bob. See The Malthus Homepage, a site maintained by Nigel Malthus, a descendent.For more information on Malthus’s life and works, see New School Profiles: Thomas Robert Malthus and The International Society of Malthus. Lauren Landsburg

Editor, Library of Economics and Liberty

First Pub. Date

London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul's Church-yard

1st edition

The text of this edition is in the public domain. Picture of Malthus courtesy of The Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection at Duke University.

An Essay on the Principle of Population

The 1803 edition.

• Thomas Robert Malthus
• Edited by: Shannon C. Stimson
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Copyright year: 2018
• Main content: 448
• Other: 2 b-w illus.
• Published: February 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780300231892

An Essay on the Principle of Population

The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798 through J. Johnson (London). The author was soon identified as The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. While it was not the first book on population, it has been acknowledged as the most influential work of its era. Its 6th Edition was independently cited as a key influence by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection. Warning: template has been deprecated.

PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION ,

AS IT AFFECTS

THE FUTURE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIETY.

WITH REMARKS

ON THE SPECULATIONS OF MR. GODWIN,

M. CONDORCET,

AND OTHER WRITERS.

PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, IN ST. PAUL'S

CHURCHYARD.

The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay, on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. The discussion, started the general question of the future improvement of society; and the Author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend, upon paper, in a clearer manner than he thought he could do, in conversation. But as the subject opened upon him, some ideas occurred, which he did not recollect to have met with before; and as he conceived, that every, the least light, on a topic so generally interesting, might be received with candour, he determined to put his thoughts in a form for publication.

​ The essay might, undoubtedly, have been rendered much more complete by a collection of a greater number of facts in elucidation of the general argument. But a long and almost total interruption, from very particular business, joined to a desire (perhaps imprudent) of not delaying the publication much beyond the time that he originally proposed, prevented the Author from giving to the subject an undivided attention. He presumes, however, that the facts which he has adduced, will be found, to form no inconsiderable evidence for the truth of his opinion respecting the future improvement of mankind. As the Author contemplates this opinion at present, little more appears to him to be necessary than a plain statement, in addition to the most cursory view of society, to establish it.

​ It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects, has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected: and it is a view of these means, which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society. He hopes it will appear, that, in the discussion of this interesting subject, he is actuated solely by a love of truth; and not by any prejudices against any particular set of men, or of opinions. He professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society, in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary; but he has not acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what ​ he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.

The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue; but he feels conscious, that he has drawn these dark tints, from a conviction that they are really in the picture; and not from a jaundiced eye, or an inherent spleen of disposition. The theory of mind which he has sketched in the two last chapters, accounts to his own understanding, in a satisfactory manner, for the existence of most of the evils of life; but whether it will have the same effect upon others must be left to the judgement of his readers.

If he should succeed in drawing the attention of more able men, to what he conceives to be the principal difficulty in ​ the way to the improvement of society, and should, in consequence, see this difficulty removed, even in theory, he will gladly retract his present opinions, and rejoice in a conviction of his error.

June 7, 1798.

CHAP. VIII.

CHAP. XIII.

CHAP. XVII.

CHAP. XVIII.

This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

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The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus

Edited by E. A. Wrigley; David Souden

• Published: 2010
• DOI: 10.4324/9781851960019
• Set ISBN: 9781851960019

Set Contents

• Introduction
• Volume 7. Essays on Political Economy
• Volume 8. Definitions in Political Economy: with Index to the Works of Malthus
• Volume 1. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
• Volume 2. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1826): Part I
• Volume 3. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1826): Part II
• Volume 4. Essays on Population
• Volume 5. Principles of Political Economy: Part I
• Volume 6. Principles of Political Economy: Part II

An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

• E. A. Wrigley
• David Souden

The first, and anonymous, publication in 1798 of a Surrey curate was a book that can fairly be described as having shaken the world. The Reverend Mr Malthus’s views on population and the implications of its growth had considerable and immediate impact: for Malthus and his polemic were very much of the moment.

For the vast majority of Englishmen, any sympathy for the revolution in France had long since evaporated. England and France were at war; the dangers of severe food shortage and high prices were apparent, and were to be fully realized within the next few years; the costs of maintaining the poor, and their visibility, were high. Within intellectual society, there was keen discussion of evidence for and against England having a rising population, and controversy over the views of those who believed that society could be perfected. Malthus was not on the side of those who thought that numbers were rising rapidly, but was on the side of those who argued against William Godwin and others. Within political society, there were difficulties: Malthus was a Whig, and the mid-1790s were hardly an auspicious period for Whig politics. Yet his Essay on the principle of population as it affects the future improvement of society enjoyed immediate and controversial success.

Volume Contents

• content locked Front Matter
• content locked The publications of Thomas Robert Malthus
• content locked Publications about Malthus and his work
• content locked Table of the sources used by Malthus in the successive editions of the Essay on population
• content locked Consolidated bibliography of the sources referred to by Malthus in his published works
• content locked Notes on the printing of variant texts
• content locked Introduction to volume one Edited by David Souden
• content locked Prelims
• content locked I Question stated – Little prospects of a determination of it, from the enmity of the opposing parties – The principal argument against the perfectibility of man and of society has never been fairly answered – Nature of the difficulty arising from population – Outline of the principal argument of the essay
• content locked II The different ratios in which population and food increase – The necessary effects of these different ratios of increase – Oscillation produced by them in the condition of the lower classes of society – Reasons why this oscillation has not been so much observed as might be expected – Three propositions on which the general argument of the essay depends – The different states in which mankind have been known to exist proposed to be examined with reference to these three propositions
• content locked III The savage or hunter state shortly reviewed – The shepherd state, or the tribes of barbarians that overran the Roman Empire – The superiority of the power of population to the means of subsistence – the cause of the great tide of northern emigration
• content locked IV State of civilized nations – Probability that Europe is much more populous now than in the time of Julius Caesar – Best criterion of population – Probable error of Hume in one of the criterions that he proposes as assisting in an estimate of population – Slow increase of population at present in most of the states of Europe – The two principal checks to population – The first or preventive check examined with regard to England
• content locked V The second, or positive check to population examined, in England – The true cause why the immense sum collected in England for the poor does not better their condition – The powerful tendency of the poor laws to defeat their own purpose – Palliative of the distresses of the poor proposed – The absolute impossibility from the fixed laws of our nature, that the pressure of want can ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society – All the checks to population may be resolved into misery or vice
• content locked VI New colonies – Reasons of their rapid increase – North American colonies – Extraordinary instances of increase in the back settlements – Rapidity with which even old states recover the ravages of war, pestilence, famine, or the convulsions of nature
• content locked VII A probable cause of epidemics – Extracts from Mr Süssmilch’s tables – Periodical returns of sickly seasons to be expected in certain cases – Proportion of births to burials for short periods in any country an inadequate criterion of the real average increase of population – Best criterion of a permanent increase of population – Great frugality of living one of the causes of the famines of China and Hindustan – Evil tendency of one of the clauses of Mr Pitt’s Poor Bill – Only one proper way of encouraging population – Causes of the happiness of nations – Famine, the last and most dreadful mode by which nature represses a redundant population – The three propositions considered as established
• content locked VIII Mr Wallace – Error of supposing that the difficulty arising from population is at a great distance – Mr Condorcet’s sketch of the progress of the human mind – Period when the oscillation, mentioned by Mr Condorcet, ought to be applied to the human race
• content locked IX Mr Condorcet’s conjecture concerning the organic perfectibility of man, and the indefinite prolongation of human life – Fallacy of the argument, which infers an unlimited progress from a partial improvement, the limit of which cannot be ascertained, illustrated in the breeding of animals, and the cultivation of plants
• content locked X Mr Godwin’s system of equality – Error of attributing all the vices of mankind to human institutions – Mr Godwin’s first answer to the difficulty arising from population totally insufficient – Mr Godwin’s beautiful system of equality supposed to be realized – Its utter destruction simply from the principle of population in so short a time as thirty years
• content locked XI Mr Godwin’s conjecture concerning the future extinction of the passion between the sexes – Little apparent grounds for such a conjecture – Passion of lave not inconsistent either with reason or virtue.
• content locked XII Mr Godwin’s conjecture concerning the indefinite prolongation of human life – Improper inference drawn from the effects of mental stimulants on the human frame, illustrated in various instances – Conjectures not founded on any indications in the past, not to be considered as philosophical conjectures – Mr Godwin’s and Mr Condorcet’s conjecture respecting the approach of man towards immortality on earth, a curious instance of the inconsistency of scepticism
• content locked XIII Error of Mr Godwin in considering man too much in the light of a being merely rational – In the compound being, man, the passions will always act as disturbing forces in the decisions of the understanding – Reasonings of Mr Godwin on the subject of coercion – Some truths of a nature not to be communicated from one man to another.
• content locked XIV Mr Godwin’s five propositions respecting political truth, on which his whole work hinges, not established – Reasons we have for supposing from the distress occasioned by the principle of population, that the vices, and moral weakness of man can never be wholly eradicated – Perfectibility, in the sense in which Mr Godwin uses the term, not applicable to man – Nature of the real perfectibility of man illustrated
• content locked XV Models too perfect, may sometimes rather impede than promote improvements – Mr Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion – Impossibility of dividing the necessary labour of a society amicably among all – Invectives against labour may produce present evil, with little or no chance of producing future good–An accession to the mass of agricultural labour must always be an advantage to the labourer
• content locked XVI Probable error of Dr Adam Smith in representing every increase of the revenue or stock of a society as an increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour – Instances where an increase of wealth can have no tendency to better the condition of the labouring poor – England has increased in riches without a proportional increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour – The state of the poor in China would not be improved by an increase of wealth from manufactures
• content locked XVII Question of the proper definition of the wealth of a state – Reason given by the French economists for considering all manufacturers as unproductive labourers, not the true reason – The labour of artificers, and manufacturers sufficiently productive to individuals, though not to the state – A remarkable passage in Dr Price’s two volumes of observations – Error of Dr Price in attributing the happiness and rapid population of America, chiefly, to its peculiar state of civilisation – No advantage can be expected from shutting our eyes to the difficulties in the way to the improvement of society
• content locked XVIII The constant pressure of distress on man, from the principle of population, seems to direct our hopes to the future – State of trial inconsistent with our ideas of the foreknowledge of God – The world, probably, a mighty process for awakening matter into mind - Theory of the formation of mind – Excitements from the wants of the body – Excitements from the operation of general laws – Excitements from the difficulties of life arising from the principle of population.
• content locked XIX The sorrows of life necessary to soften and humanize the heart – The excitements of social sympathy often produce characters of a higher order than the mere possessors of talents – Moral evil probably necessary to the production of moral excellence – Excitements from intellectual wants continually kept up by the infinite variety of nature, and the obscurity that involves metaphysical subjects – The difficulties in revelation to be accounted for upon this principle – The degree of evidence which the scriptures contain, probably, best suited to the improvement of the human faculties, and the moral amelioration of mankind– The idea that mind is created by excitements, seems to account for the existence of natural and moral evil
• content locked Back Matter

An Essay on the Principle of Population

50 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-15

Chapters 16-19

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus was first published anonymously in 1798. Its core argument, that human population will inevitably outgrow its capacity to produce food, widely influenced the field of early 19th century economics and social science. Immediately after its first printing, Malthus’s essay garnered significant attention from his contemporaries, and he soon felt the need to reveal his identity. Although it was highly controversial, An Essay on the Principle of Population nevertheless left its impression on foundational 19th century theorists, such as naturalist Charles Darwin and economists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Modern economists have largely dismissed the Malthusian perspective . Principally, they argue Malthus underappreciated the exponential growth brought about by the advent of the Industrial Revolution; by the discovery of new energy sources, such as coal and electricity; and later by further technological innovations. These modern criticisms are easily defended with historical retrospective.

Malthus’s essay has been revised several times since its publication. This summary focuses on the contents of the first edition. In 1806, Malthus revamped his work into four books to further discuss points of contention in the first edition and address many of the criticisms it received. Three more editions followed (published in 1807, 1817, and 1826 respectively), each modifying or clarifying points made in the second version.

Although Malthus’s basic stance on the unsustainable growth of population to food production remains the same throughout all versions, the most dramatic change in format and content is found between the first and second editions. The first edition is notable for its long and detailed critique of the works of William Godwin, Marquis de Condorcet, and Richard Price on the perfectibility of humankind. Its lack of “hard data” and its unpracticed opinions on sex and reproduction were heavily criticized by his contemporaries. The 1806 publication, written at a later point in Malthus’s life, attempts to address these issues by focusing less on critiquing the works of other theorists and offering better data on the fluctuation of population growth throughout various European countries and colonies (Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population: the 1803 edition . Yale University Press. 2018).

An Essay on the Principle of Population begins with a preface and is subsequently separated into eleven chapters. The preface reveals that a conversation with a friend on the future improvement of society was what sparked Malthus’s inspiration for this work. Chapter 1 further credits the works of David Hume, Alfred Russel, Adam Smith, and many others for inspiring his own writing. He postulates that population grows exponentially, whereas food production only increases in a linear fashion. This disparity in power will inevitably lead to overpopulation and an inadequate amount of food for subsistence.

Chapter 2 further details the above premise. Malthus imagines a world of abundance. In such a society of ease and leisure, no one would be anxious about providing for their families, which incentivizes them to marry early, causing birth rates to explode. When there are too many people and too little an increase in food to support them, the lower classes will be plunged into a state of misery. Thus, Malthus concludes that population growth only happens when there is an increase in subsistence, and misery and vice keep the world from overpopulation.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Malthus applies his theory to different stages of society. He argues that “savage” and shepherding societies never grow as fast as their “civilized” counterparts because various miseries keep their numbers in check. Among “savage” societies, a lack of food and a general disrespect of personal liberties prevent their numbers from increasing rapidly. Shepherding communities, meanwhile, often wage war over territories and suffer a high mortality rate. Civilized societies grew rapidly after adopting the practice of tilling, but due to exhausting most fertile land, their numbers no longer increase at the same rate as before.

The following two chapters are notable because they are the only ones that contain hard data. Malthus cites philosopher Richard Price for his analysis of population in America and references demographer Johann Peter Süssmilch for his work on Prussia. Malthus uses both these examples to prove that population fluctuates in accordance with the quantity of food produced. Chapters 8 and 9 are dedicated to critiquing mathematician Marquis de Condorcet’s work while chapters 10 to 15 do the same for political philosopher William Godwin. Malthus rejects the idea of mankind as infinitely perfectible and dismisses charity as a method to relieve poverty.

Chapters 16 and 17 propose the increase of food production as the only solution to reduce extreme poverty and misery among the lower class. Malthus maintains that donating funds is but a temporary relief to aid the most unfortunate; only a permanent increase in agricultural yield can grow the lower class’s purchasing power. Nevertheless, the final two chapters remind readers that misery and happiness must coexist. The law of nature, the way of living intended by God and demonstrated by Malthus’s population theory, requires both wealth and poverty to function.

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Thomas Malthus on population

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Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) demonstrated perfectly the propensity of each generation to overthrow the fondest schemes of the last when he published An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he painted the gloomiest picture imaginable of the human prospect. He argued that population , tending to grow at a geometric rate, will ever press against the food supply, which at best increases only arithmetically, and thus poverty and misery are forever inescapable. This idea is altogether plausible, if simplistic, and its rapid adoption by theorists of the laissez-faire school is largely responsible for the designation of economics as the “dismal science.” Malthus’s argument had a profounder effect on the science of biology , for it was the reading of his essay that sparked the idea of natural selection by survival of the fittest in the minds of both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace .

By the time Malthus was asked to write the article “Population” for the 1824 Supplement of the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , he had somewhat moderated the bleakness of An Essay on the Principle of Population , at least to the extent of adding to the “positive checks” on population—war, starvation, and so on—the idea of more benign “preventive checks,” prudential acts like the purposeful delay of marriage and childbearing. The following short excerpt from Malthus’s article focuses on his ideas about population control.

Consider…the nature of those checks which have been classed under the general heads of Preventive and Positive.

It will be found that they are all resolvable into moral restraint , vice , and misery . And if, from the laws of nature, some check to the increase of population be absolutely inevitable, and human institutions have any influence upon the extent to which each of these checks operates, a heavy responsibility will be incurred, if all that influence, whether direct or indirect, be not exerted to diminish the amount of vice and misery.

Moral restraint, in application to the present subject, may be defined to be, abstinence from marriage, either for a time or permanently, from prudential considerations, with a strictly moral conduct towards the sex in the interval. And this is the only mode of keeping population on a level with the means of subsistence, which is perfectly consistent with virtue and happiness. All other checks, whether of the preventive or the positive kind, though they may greatly vary in degree, resolve themselves into some form of vice or misery.

The remaining checks of the preventive kind, are the sort of intercourse which renders some of the women of large towns unprolific: a general corruption of morals with regard to the sex, which has a similar effect; unnatural passions and improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections. These evidently come under the head of vice.

The positive checks to population include all the causes, which tend in any way prematurely to shorten the duration of human life; such as unwholesome occupations—severe labour and exposure to the seasons—bad and insufficient food and clothing arising from poverty—bad nursing of children—excesses of all kinds—great towns and manufactories—the whole train of common diseases and epidemics —wars, infanticide, plague, and famine. Of these positive checks, those which appear to arise from the laws of nature , may be called exclusively misery; and those which we bring upon ourselves, such as wars, excesses of all kinds, and many others, which it would be in our power to avoid, are of a mixed nature. They are brought upon us by vice, and their consequences are misery.

…Prudence cannot be enforced by laws, without a great violation of natural liberty, and a great risk of producing more evil than good. But still, the very great influence of a just and enlightened government, and the perfect security of property in creating habits of prudence, cannot for a moment be questioned.…

The existence of a tendency in mankind to increase, if unchecked, beyond the possibility of an adequate supply of food in a limited territory, must at once determine the question as to the natural right of the poor to full support in a state of society where the law of property is recognized. The question, therefore, resolves itself chiefly into a question relating to the necessity of those laws which establish and protect private property. It has been usual to consider the right of the strongest as the law of nature among mankind as well as among brutes; yet, in so doing, we at once give up the peculiar and distinctive superiority of man as a reasonable being, and class him with the beasts of the field.…If it be generally considered as so discreditable to receive parochial relief, that great exertions are made to avoid it, and few or none marry with a certain prospect of being obliged to have recourse to it, there is no doubt that those who were really in distress might be adequately assisted, with little danger of a constantly increasing proportion of paupers; and in that case a great good would be attained without any proportionate evil to counterbalance it.

Thomas Robert Malthus

Logic and rhetoric in malthus's essay on the principle of population, 1798.

SOURCE: Walzer, Arthur E. “Logic and Rhetoric in Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 1 (February 1987): 1-17.

[ In the following essay, Walzer analyzes Malthus's Essay in terms of its rhetorical strategies. ]

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus published anonymously An Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. 1 In his famous Essay, Malthus argues against the possibility of the utopian future predicted by such Enlightenment reformers as William Godwin and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet. To counter the reformers' philosophic optimism, Malthus advances his principle of population. According to Malthus, population tends to increase at a geometric rate by a factor of two every generation (or twenty-five years). Thus, in 1700, assuming a population of five million people in England and Wales, by 1725 population would be ten million; by 1750, twenty million; by 1775, forty million; by 1800, eighty million— if the actual rate were the rate of its theoretical tendency. Of course, the actual rate did not increase at a geometric (or exponential) rate. There were not eighty million people in England and Wales in 1800; there were about nine million, so it should be clear to all, and is clear to Malthus, that population is prevented from increasing at the rate to which it tends. What prevents it Malthus calls “checks,” chief among which are death and disease caused by malnutrition that results from the inability of the food supply to keep pace with the increase in population. Food supply, Malthus estimates, increases at an arithmetic rate every twenty-five years: one million bushels in 1700, for example, two million in 1725, three million in 1750, four million in 1775, resulting in lower per capita supply of grain even as the total amount of grain increases. The discrepancy between the geometric rate of population increase and the arithmetic rate of increase for the food supply: this is the principle of population. Since the reforms proposed by Condorcet and Godwin would, if anything, increase the actual population by lessening the checks and decrease the incentive to increase food production, their utopias would either never come to pass or, if realized, soon self-destruct. In the Essay, Malthus summarizes his principle in Chapters I and II, traces its operation from the beginnings of civilization to the present in Chapters III-VII, brings it to bear on the predictions of, principally, Condorcet and Godwin in Chapters VIII-XVII, and in Chapters XVIII-XIX explains how the principle of population fits into the divine telos.

The Essay generated a response that was voluminous and emotionally charged. “No contemporary volume produced so powerful an effect upon the age in which it was written as the Essay on Population, ” commented the Edinburgh Review in its retrospective article on Malthus in 1838, two years after his death. 2 Even allowing for the degree of hyperbole appropriate to the occasion in the reviewer's assessment, still, no one has ever doubted the power of Malthus's Essay to move readers in the nineteenth century or since. Articles in response to the Essay filled contemporary reviews, and book-length studies variously praised and condemned what became known as “Malthusian doctrine.” 3 Robert Southey enlisted John Rickman to crush Malthus, the “mischievous reptile,” and, with Coleridge's help, attacked the Essay in the Annual Review. 4 Karl Marx denounced the Essay as a “schoolboyish, superficial plagiary,” but today Malthus is praised in the People's Republic of China and the Essay enshrined by Robert B. Downs as one of the sixteen most important books in the history of the world. 5 The Essay is formidable; it has not been, and apparently cannot be, ignored. Perhaps William Hazlitt's characterization of the Essay and readers' response to it is best: it is, Hazlitt observed, “a facer”—a stunning blow to the face. 6

Despite the Essay's evident persuasive power, no rhetorical study of it exists. 7 It may be that the attack on the politics and philosophy of the Essay by romantics, including Coleridge, Hazlitt, Southey, and Shelley, explains its neglect by literary and rhetorical critics; or it may be that as neither fiction nor oral address the Essay would not fall routinely into the ken of either group of scholars. Today, perhaps as a result of this neglect, Malthus is often presented as an early demographer or as England's first political economist and the Essay seen as the result of a scientific study of the forces that influence the rate of population growth. 8 But Malthus's intentions in 1798 were those of the polemicist, and the Essay was the product and instrument of a refutation. Thus, as I will try to show, the Essay on Population is pre-eminently a rhetorical achievement: its origin is in controversy; its contribution (Malthus insists) is its tracing and dramatizing, in terms meaningful to its audience, the effects of a principle long known but little understood; and it draws its power from its evocation, even conscious imitation, of Newton's Principia.

RHETORICAL SITUATION

The immediate occasion of the Essay was, as Malthus explains in its Preface, a disagreement with “a friend” (Preface, i), apparently his father, Daniel, 9 over William Godwin's essay, “Of Avarice and Profusion,” from his Enquirer (1797). The disagreement broadened to the general question of the prospects for progress—the question that is the heart of Godwin's more famous Political Justice (1793)—with Malthus taking the conservative, skeptical view against his father, once an apostle of Rousseau. In what is a documented example of rhetoric's epistemic power, Malthus, referring to himself in the third person, explains that he took up his pen only with the intention of stating in a “clearer manner” thoughts he had previously expressed, but “as the subject opened upon him, some ideas occurred, which he did not recollect to have met with before” (Preface, i). Thus did Malthus arrive at his articulation of the famous principle of population. 10

The foci of Malthus's attack were Godwin's Political Justice and the Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). 11 Both works represent extreme versions of Enlightenment optimism and rationalism. In Political Justice, Godwin predicts a future in which mankind will approach perfection. According to Godwin, the principal obstacles that have in the past prevented man's realization of his perfection are government, “which is, in all cases, an evil,” and its instruments that promote conformity, including principally established religion, absolute property rights, and national education. 12 The “characters of men originate in their external circumstances,” Godwin writes. 13 Cleanse the environment of benighted ideas perpetuated by traditional institutions and replace them with enlightened ones and man will choose equality over competition and intellectual pleasures over vanity. Man will then direct energy toward improving health and education, not acquiring and displaying luxury, and he may attain perfection. Similarly, Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch, first published in 1795, combines a critique of traditional institutions and an acceptance of eighteenth-century environmentalism to explain the slow pace of man's progress in the past and the possibility of his future perfectibility. The Sketch traces humanity's development from tribal society to the foundation of the French Republic, which Condorcet judges the culmination of our enlightenment and progress to date, and concludes with a discussion of the likelihood of humankind's future perfection.

Malthus's philosophy, which has roots in Renaissance Christian humanism, was far more conservative than Godwin's and Condorcet's. While Condorcet and Godwin advanced the probability of the perfectibility of humankind, Malthus doubts the possibility of significant moral progress. In the Essay, he argues that the narrative in Genesis, even if not a historical account, does relate a philosophical truth about the “torpor and corruption” of humankind (354) that makes our approximating perfection impossible. The “vices and moral weakness of mankind … are invincible,” Malthus insists (271). Godwin and Condorcet regard humans as exclusively rational and, therefore, as necessarily receptive and responsive to sound reasoning; Malthus argues that humans are not “merely intellectual” but subject also to “corporal propensities” (252) that will defeat good intentions and influence actions. While Godwin and Condorcet place much confidence in the ability of institutions to shape and change humankind, Malthus regards the shaping influence of institutions as “light and superficial … mere feathers that float on the surface” (177). He rejects the direct circuitry that Godwin, especially, assumes by which changes in the environment or in education necessarily result in actions consistent with them. Finally, while reformers such as Condorcet and Godwin regard traditions as obstacles to the social experimentation that would contribute to progress, Malthus regards society as an organism with roots in history and “experiments” such as those that brought about the French Revolution as “the forcing manure” that has “burst the calyx of humanity” (274).

Historical and political circumstances predisposed Malthus's readers to his point of view and made his chosen targets—Condorcet and Godwin—inviting and easy to hit. In the late 1790s, the French threat—her ideas as well as her increasingly aggressive foreign policy—was prominent in the English mind. Many in England traced the origin of the disorder in France that culminated in the Reign of Terror to the earlier philosophical attack on religious and political institutions that accompanied calls for radical social and political reform. Condorcet and Godwin were seen as systematizers of these dangerous tendencies and ideas. One reviewer of Malthus's Essay judged Godwin and Condorcet as holding a “conspicuous place” among the apologists for ideas that in France “left not one stone on another of that edifice which it had been the labor of so many centuries to raise, to strengthen, and to embellish.” 14 The fame that Political Justice had won Godwin among English intellectuals in 1793 had already peaked by 1798: the radical “enquirer” began to be seen as the bearer of the disorder of France to England. As one reviewer notes, “Mr. Malthus could not have obtained more credit in the eighth century for laying the devil, than he has in the eighteenth for laying Mr. Godwin.” 15 Secondly, Malthus's message was certainly congenial to the bourgeoisie and landed gentry who made up much of his audience. In arguing that poverty was caused by the discrepancy in the rates of increase of population and food, Malthus made poverty seem so nearly endemic to the nature of things that efforts to alleviate it were sure to fail: “To remove the wants of the lower classes of society, is indeed an arduous task. The truth is, that the pressure of distress on this part of a community is an evil so deeply seated, that no human ingenuity can reach it” (95). Passages like this one provoked Karl Marx to rage that Malthus was “greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development.” 16 Although other passages from the Essay can be cited to show that Malthus intended to help the poor and that he was not a tool of the ruling classes, 17 his recommendation to eliminate gradually the Poor Laws was welcomed by many of those taxed to support their increasing costs. Many of Malthus's bourgeois readers were, unsurprisingly, most willing to embrace his call for restraints when others were to make the sacrifices and experience the pain. As one reviewer observed, “No wonder Mr. Malthus should be a fashionable philosopher. He writes advice for the poor for the rich to read.” 18

It hardly detracts from Malthus's accomplishments as a rhetorician to grant that his victory was made easier by Godwin's waning reputation, the general fear of things French, and the frustrations brought on by the rising expenditures to relieve the poor. “Mr. Malthus embarked upon the tide just at the happy moment, at the flood when it leads to fortune,” a contemporary noted. Godwin, at least, was engulfed: “‘Mr. Malthus appeared, and we heard no more of Mr. Godwin.’” 19

THE RHETORIC OF THE ESSAY : “THE NEWTON OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY”

The rhetoric of the Essay is best illuminated when set against the backdrop of the controversy over scientific methodology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Malthus marshalls many arguments in an effort to refute the views of Godwin and Condorcet, central to the credibility of these arguments is Malthus's clear implication that his method meets the test of Newtonian science, while the method of Condorcet and Godwin mimics Descartes'. Descartes' theory purported to explain the movement and relative position of the planets and gravity by postulating a “primary matter”—invisible, infinitely divisible particles that filled space and carried the planets around in whirling vortices. This “vortex theory” competed with Newton's theory well into the eighteenth century. The Newtonians dismissed the vortex theory, which they argued only seemed mathematical and which could not be tested mathematically because the “primary matter” on which it depended was strictly hypothetical. The Cartesians were committed to maintaining the logical consistency of the theory only, the Newtonians insisted, not in genuinely establishing its truth by subjecting it to empirical or even rigid mathematical tests. The vortex theory is nothing more than “dreams and chimeras,” Roger Cotes, one of the Newtonians, insisted in language suggesting that the vortex theory was a new version of a discredited Artistotelianism. 20

In the Essay, Malthus portrays Condorcet and Godwin as Cartesians, whose method is flawed by its exclusive reliance on deduction from hypotheses that are not empirically established. Malthus opposes his Newtonian (therefore, English and modern but also universal) method to Godwin's and Condorcet's Cartesian (therefore, French, scholastic, and eccentric) method. Thus Malthus's reactionary conclusions are made to rest on a modern, English methodology. The rhetoric of the Essay made it possible for Malthus's readers to embrace his conservatism without abandoning the basis for all Enlightenment hopes for progress—Newtonian science.

Newton never set forth a systematic description of his method or recommended that his method be applied to works, like the Essay, that are not concerned with science. But some eighteenth-century logics do both, and William Duncan's Elements of Logick (1748) is perhaps the most important of these. Wilbur Samuel Howell singles out Duncan's Elements as “the most challenging and most up-to-date book of its time, place, and class,” in large part for its successful explanation of a method that grafted empiricism to traditional deduction in the manner of the Newtonians. 21 The Elements was part of the curriculum in mathematics that Malthus took up at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Malthus refers to his study of Duncan in a letter from Cambridge to his father: “The lectures begin to-morrow. … We begin with mechanics and Maclaurin, Newton, and Keill's Physics. We shall also have lectures on Mondays and Fridays in Duncan's Logick. ” 22 The Elements influenced the rhetoric of the Essay, and the manifest traces of this important book in the opening chapters contributed to the Essay's persuasive impact. 23

Duncan's Elements is distinguished by its effort to combine empiricism with traditional deduction to form an idealized synthesis that Duncan identifies as Newton's method. Duncan praises both the “method of science” (deduction) and the “natural method” (empiricism), but he carefully circumscribes the claims of each. For example, Duncan points out that conclusions properly deduced from self-evident premises intuitively arrived at are “eternal, necessary, and immutable Truths.” 24 But such conclusions, he cautioned, do not necessarily conform to a reality outside the mind: for those who know the definition of a circle, it will always be true that the center is equidistant from any point on the circumference, but it “does not follow, because I have the Idea of a Circle in my Mind, that therefore a Figure answering to that Idea, has a real Existence in Nature. I can form to myself the Notion of a Centaur, or a golden Mountain, but never imagine on that account, that either of them exist.” 25 For Duncan, the error of the Cartesians and Aristotelians—and for Malthus, the error of Condorcet and Godwin—was to assume that what has a basis in logic has a foundation in fact; such a method, Duncan writes, “opens a Way to Castles in the Air of our own building, to many chimerical and fanciful Systems, which Men of warm and lively Imaginations love to entertain themselves with; but promises little of that Knowledge which is worth a wise Man's Regard, and respects the great Ends and Purposes of Life.” 26 The corrective to the limitations of deduction is the method of Newton—one that combines deduction and empiricism: “In this manner Sir Isaac Newton, having determined the Laws of Gravity by a Variety of Experiments, and laying it down as a Principle, that it operates according to those Laws thro' the whole System of Nature; has thence in a Way of strict Demonstration, deduced the whole Theory of heavenly Motions. For granting once this Postulatum, that Gravity belongs universally to all Bodies, and that it acts according to their solid Content, decreasing with the Distance in a given Ratio; what Sir Isaac has determined in regard to the Planetary Motions, follows from the bare Consideration of our own Ideas; that is, necessarily and scientifically. ” 27 This method, Duncan goes on to assert, can be applied to works of politics and morality: “The same thing happens in Politicks and Morality. If we form to ourselves Ideas of such Communities, Connections, Actions, and Conjectures, as do or may subsist among Mankind; all our Reasonings and Conclusions will then respect real Life, and serve as steddy Maxims of Behaviour in the several Circumstances to which it is liable. It is not therefore enough that we set about the Consideration of any Ideas at random; we must further take care that those Ideas truly regard Things themselves: for although Knowledge is always certain when derived from the Contemplation of our own Ideas, yet is it then only useful and worthy our Regard, when it respects Ideas taken from the real Objects of Nature, and strictly related to the Concerns of human Life.” 28

In the Essay, Malthus explicitly follows Duncan, associating his method with Duncan's version of Newton's. His method of arrangement conforms to Duncan's recommended “Synthetick Method.” 29 This method of arrangement prescribes summarizing the principles and conclusions in syllogistic form at the outset, as distinct from the “Analytick Method,” which, following the presumed actual order of discovery, prescribes presenting the conclusions after presenting the evidence and at the end of the work. Malthus first presents his “postulata”: that food is necessary for man and that the passion between the sexes will remain in its present state (11). Since these are postulata, that is self-evident, applied propositions, 30 they are capable of yielding “incontrovertible truths,” as Malthus later claims (38). He next summarizes his argument in syllogistic form:

Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. [Because] Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. [But] By the law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. [Therefore] This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

After applying his postulata (what Duncan and other logicians call “scholia”) 31 to the animal world, Malthus concludes in the spirit of quod erat demonstratum : “Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind” (17).

Duncan observed, quoting Locke, that “in all sorts of Reasonings, every single Argument should be managed as a Mathematical Demonstration, the Connection and Dependence of Ideas should be followed, till the Mind is brought to the Source on which it bottoms, and can trace the Coherence through the whole Train of Proofs.” 32 Malthus's “postulata,” “propositions,” “laws,” his insistence that his theory is undeniable because his principle is “so evident that it needs no illustration” (37): this is the language of deduction from self-evident propositions—the language of geometry. Whatever contribution, if any, this “method of science” (to use Duncan's phrase) made to Malthus's discovery or validation of his theory, the rehearsal of it in the opening chapters of the Essay is a means of persuasion. But Duncan's recommended “synthetick method” only begins with deduction. In the manner of Newton, we must confirm these valid conclusions from self-evident truths by subjecting them to an empirical test—the “natural method.” In the Essay, the appeal to empiricism is also a means of persuasion. Malthus insists that, if his theory is to be judged true, it must be tested against experience: “and I think it will be found,” he writes in concluding the first chapter, “that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth” (17). This is a promise and a prediction he fulfills in tracing the operation of his principle of population in societies throughout the history of civilization in Chapters III-VII. Duncan's Elements was the most popular logic of its day—it was into its ninth English edition by 1800 33 —and Malthus's conspicuous insistence on the importance of both deduction and empiricism in the first two chapters of the Essay would have had considerable persuasive impact on the educated portion of his audience who would associate Duncan's synthesis with Newton's method and Newton with truth.

In Chapters IX-XV, which comprise Malthus's refutation, the analogy of the Essay to the Principia is manifest. Malthus's criticism of Condorcet and Godwin tends to move quickly from an attack on a particular policy or prediction to the mode of reasoning on which it rests—on the assumption that if the method is wrong, the details need not be argued. Malthus faults Condorcet and Godwin on two counts: first, they ignore experience, and thus their conclusions are not empirical; second, in their enthusiasm for logic, they commit the fallacy that Aristotle identifies as inferring an absolute from a particular ( Rhetoric, 1402 a ), in this case by moving from a premise that improvement is possible to the conclusion that unlimited improvement or perfection is probable. In sum, they confuse logical consistency for empirical reality, a confusion that parallels the criticism made by the English against the Cartesians, who “insisted on phenomena which they regarded as logically necessary but for which they could bring no actual evidence.” 34 In the Essay, Malthus casts Condorcet and Godwin as Cartesians to play opposite to his Newton.

The circumstances in which Condorcet composed his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind are for Malthus evidence that Condorcet adheres to a theory in the face of compelling evidence to its contrary. Condorcet wrote the Sketch lauding the establishment of the French Republic as the apex of human progress and enlightenment while in hiding, under sentence of death, from the Reign of Terror. This irony, Malthus claims, is a “singular instance of the attachment of a man to principles, which every day's experience was so fatally for himself contradicting” (144). Malthus finds such blind adherence to theory characteristic of the thinking of Condorcet and Godwin. Malthus insists that Condorcet's prediction that man's longevity will increase “to an unlimited extent” rests on a similar valuation of logical possibility over empirical reality. That man's life span will increase to an “unlimited extent” is an inference that is “in the highest degree unphilosophical, and totally unwarranted by any appearances in the laws of nature” (157). In the absence of present evidence to support Condorcet's prediction, Malthus supposes that Condorcet advances it in the hope that evidence will later appear. This method, which if adopted generally would mark “an end to all human science,” is the method not of Newton but of Descartes:

If this be the case, there is at once an end of all human science. The whole train of reasonings from effects to causes will be destroyed. We may shut our eyes to the book of nature, as it will no longer be of any use to read it. The wildest and most improbable conjectures may be advanced with as much certainty as the most just and sublime theories, founded on careful and reiterated experiments. We may return again to the old mode of philosophizing, and make facts bend to systems, instead of establishing systems upon facts. The grand and consistent theory of Newton, will be placed upon the same footing as the wild and excentric hypotheses of Descartes.

Condorcet's method is proof that, despite its progressive veneer, his and similar theories “so far from enlarging the bounds of human science, they are contracting it … [and] are throwing us back again almost into the infancy of knowledge … by substituting wild flights and unsupported assertions, for patient investigation, and well authenticated proofs” (161-2), Malthus writes in a note.

Malthus's critique of Godwin's ideas is the literal as well as the rhetorical center of the Essay : it begins in the tenth of the Essay's nineteen chapters. The analogy of Godwin-is-to-Descartes-as-Malthus-is-to-Newton, which is implied throughout Chapters IX-XV, can be illustrated by concentrating on two related arguments of Godwin's that Malthus is at particular pains to refute: first, Godwin's prediction that man's life span can be lengthened to approach immortality on earth; and, second, Godwin's speculation that the passion between the sexes will lessen nearly to the point of extinction. This second conjecture Godwin makes to answer the objection to the predicted increased longevity from the principle of population.

Both predictions rest on Godwin's argument that the mind can control the body, that a thought can reign absolutely over an urge. As evidence of mind over body Godwin had cited examples of the influence of mood on the experience of fatigue. But concluding from these particular examples of partial influence a general and absolute conclusion is, Malthus insists, fallacious: “the argument is from a small and partial effect, to a great and general effect, which will in numberless instances be found to be a very fallacious mode of reasoning” (222). In addition to being fallacious, since in the last thousand years “no decided difference has been observed in the duration of human life from the operation of intellect” (239), it also mistakes a logical possibility for an empirical probability. If in the absence of available empirical evidence, Godwin bases his prediction on evidence which he trusts will later appear, then Godwin has left science to dwell in the realm of prophecy (232); he has rejected Newton's uniform laws and thrown us upon “a wide field of uncertainty” where “any one supposition is then just as good as another” (232): “it is just as unphilosophical to suppose that the life of man may be prolonged beyond any assignable limits, as to suppose that the attraction of the earth will gradually be changed into repulsion, and that stones will ultimately rise instead of fall, or that the earth will fly off at a certain period to some more genial and warmer sun” (239-40).

Malthus's refutation of Godwin's apparent prediction of an end of concupiscence follows similar lines. To infer from the axiom “man is rational” that humans will one day be only and always so and thus will have complete control of appetites is fallacious. Malthus presents this reasoning as analogous to the natural philosopher's or physicist's that assumes that phenomena will act in nature as they do in the laboratory:

Mr. Godwin considers man too much in the light of a being merely intellectual. This error, at least such I conceive it to be, pervades his whole work, and mixes itself with all his reasonings. The voluntary actions of men may originate in their opinions; but these opinions will be very differently modified in creatures compounded of a rational faculty and corporal propensities, from what they would be, in beings wholly intellectual. Mr. Godwin, in proving that sound reasoning and truth, are capable of being adequately communicated, examines the proposition first practically; and then adds, “Such is the appearance which this proposition assumes, when examined in a loose and practical view. In strict consideration it will not admit of debate. Man is a rational being, etc.” So far from calling this a strict consideration of the subject, I own I should call it the loosest, and most erroneous way possible, of considering it. It is the calculating the velocity of a falling body in vacuo; and persisting in it, that it would be the same through whatever resisting mediums it might fall. This was not Newton's mode of philosophizing. Very few general propositions are just in application to a particular subject. The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. To make the general theory just in application to the revolutions of these bodies, it was necessary to calculate accurately, the disturbing force of the sun upon the moon, and of the moon upon the earth; and till these disturbing forces were properly estimated, actual observations on the motions of these bodies, would have proved that the theory was not accurately true.

This passage is resonant with allusions to the Principia. The key phrases are “resisting mediums” and “disturbing force.” In the Principia, Book II, the title of which is “The Motions of Bodies (In Resisting Mediums),” Newton considers the forces of motions as they would exist not in empty space (the subject of Book I), but as they exist in media that offer resistance—such as the motions of a pendulum in air or of a ship in water. In the conclusion of Book II, he brings the laws he has deduced on the effects of resisting media on motions to bear on Descartes' vortex theory in order to show the inadequacies of it, to show that Descartes' theory could not meet strict empirical or mathematical tests. Newton's approach is to accept for the purposes of argument the existence of Descartes' hypothetical primary matter—the invisible, divisible substance that carried the planets around in whirlwinds. Then, granting Descartes this premise, he shows that Descartes' conclusions do not follow from it. Newton points out, for example, that a fluid of the type required to offer sufficient resistance to carry the heavenly bodies would not form an orbit like that which Descartes' theory requires. 35 In part to contrast his own more rigorous mathematical and empirical method to Descartes' method, Newton demonstrates in Book III how even his more precise theory of gravity cannot completely account for the position of the moon unless the “disturbing influence” of the force of the sun's gravity upon the moon is figured into the equation. In Book III Newton proves with precise calculations that the apparent irregularities of the moon's motion result from the distant, and therefore relatively weak but nonetheless significant, pull of the sun's gravity on the moon.

Malthus's intention is for the reader to see Godwin's method as parallel to Descartes' and his own method as Newtonian. Specifically, Malthus insists that man's “corporal propensities” are “disturbing forces” that will prevent Godwin's rational man from behaving in life in the way that he would in the laboratory of Godwin's imagination. Malthus grants Godwin the premise that man is rational and even the inference that Godwin insists follows from it—that the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions, which are susceptible to education. But man will not follow the course Godwin predicts when the model moves out of Godwin's imagination and into the world of resisting media and disturbing forces in which man's actions do not always follow his resolutions:

I am willing to allow that every voluntary act is preceded by a decision of the mind; but it is strangely opposite to what I should conceive to be the just theory upon the subject, and a palpable contradiction to all experience, to say, that the corporal propensities of man do not act very powerfully, as disturbing forces, in these decisions. … The cravings of hunger, the love of liquor, the desire of possessing a beautiful woman, will urge men to actions, of the fatal consequences of which, to the general interests of society, they are perfectly well convinced, even at the very time they commit them. Remove their bodily cravings, and they would not hesitate a moment in determining against such actions. … But … under all the circumstances of their situation with these bodily cravings, the decision of the compound being is different from the conviction of the rational being.

In a general sense, Malthus's entire critique of Godwin is best seen as an effort to do to Godwin's theoretical utopia what Newton did to Descartes' hypothetical vortex theory. Godwin's theory, Malthus insists at the outset of his refutation, lacks “the caution that sound philosophy seems to require” and “relies too much on general and abstract propositions,” ignoring at its peril applications and experience (173-74). But, as Newton did with Descartes, Malthus accepts for the purposes of argument Godwin's unrealistic view of man as “merely intellectual” and assumes that Godwin's utopia, in which luxury is despised and benevolence and reason reign, came to pass. Would this society last? Let us put it to stricter tests, Malthus says. In the absence of war, unhealthy conditions and the fear of starvation, the rate of population, Malthus concludes, would equal or surpass the doubling time of twenty-five years of North America, where conditions, though conducive to rapid population growth, were not as stimulative as Godwin's society would be. Food increase could not keep up for long. What then?

Alas! What becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty: where no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants: where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist: where Mind was delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her. This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished, reappear. The mighty law of self-preservation, expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions; and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with the large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire, and lords it triumphant over the world. No human institutions here existed, to the perverseness of which Mr. Godwin ascribes the original sin of the worst men. No opposition had been produced by them between public and private good. No monopoly had been created of those advantages which reason directs to be left in common. No man had been goaded to the breach of order by unjust laws. Benevolence had established her reign in all hearts: and yet in so short a period as within fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations.

What Newton does with numbers and mathematical formulae to Descartes, Malthus does with rhetorical devices to Godwin. For an example, focus on the phrase “chilling breath of want.” The brevity of this phrase in contrast to the long first sentence, which is lengthened by anaphora, mirrors rhetorically the calculus by which a single natural imperative (the principle of population) can defeat the most ingenious and elaborate of human plans. Furthermore, in its parallelism to and latinate play off the preceding “spirit of benevolence,” the phrase (“chilling breath of want”) sets the concreteness of Malthus's empirically-based laws of nature as rhetorical foil to Godwin's illusionary “picture.” The same oppositions are underscored rhetorically in the antitheses that contrast the “mighty law of self preservation” to “the softer or more exalted emotions of the soul,” and the idealized “rosy flush of health” to the “pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery.” In the next paragraph, the repetition of “no” and the listing of “violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of distress” (asyndeton) extend the reader's experience of the futility of man's efforts in the face of nature's inexorable laws. Through these stylistic devices, Malthus works to assure that Godwin's predictions will fail the test of his readers' experience.

The theodicy of the Essay's final two chapters has troubled some commentators, but the motivation for it is clear when it is recognized that Malthus imitates the Principia. In Chapters XVIII and XIX, Malthus attempts to “‘Vindicate the ways of God to man’” (349). The tendency of population to increase more rapidly than the production of food is here seen as “the goad of necessity” that prompts a sluggish, inert mankind to activity. Indeed, the principle of population is a divine instrument for the creation and formation of mind (354). Evil in the form of the positive checks exists “not to create despair, but activity” (395). This explanation is obviously inspired by the bleakness of the cosmology of much of the Essay. But its appropriateness has been questioned by commentators on the grounds that the argument of the Essay is compromised by Malthus's effort to hit two “targets at one time—the scientific … and the theistic.” 36 Malthus's decision to drop the theodicy from subsequent editions of the Essay may be indicative of his judgment of its success as a convincing explanation of the misery he portrays as endemic to the creation of an omnipotent, loving God. But whatever the success of the theodicy, Malthus took inspiration from the Principia. In the concluding chapter of the Principia, Newton argues that the study of nature is a way of knowing the existence and attributes of God, that the divine telos is obvious from the symmetry of the world. Since we know God through his creation, Newton argues, discourse about God “does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.” 37 Newton's dictum and practice depart markedly from the Cartesians'. In his Principles, Descartes declares it impossible for us to know God's purposes. 38 Descartes' followers carried the implication of his work further, making independence from theology a distinction of the new science. 39 To Malthus and the English, the Cartesians' acceptance of an ethereal “primary matter” while simultaneously banishing theology from science gave credence to the characterization of them as scholastic philosophers re-incarnate in a godless form. In the Essay, Malthus observes a similar “inconsistency” of Godwin and Condorcet, who hold to the possibility of the near immortality of the body, while denying the immortality of the soul, “an event indefinitely more probable” (248).

The rhetoric of the Essay is, then, characterized by Malthus's imitation and evocation of the Principia. Malthus hoped his readers would see that his Essay debates the same question that Newton addresses in the Principia : what constitutes valid explanation. Newton's famous formulation in the preface to the Principia of his achievement could serve, with changes appropriate to their different subjects, as Malthus's statement of the Essay 's achievement: “I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this—from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.” 40 As set forth in the Principia, Newton's program is to move from the investigation of basic phenomena, for example, the laws of motion, to an understanding and mathematical expression of the laws of forces, for example, gravity. Mathus wants his readers to understand his work as analogous to the program of the Principia. His postulation that population when unchecked tends to increase at a geometric rate parallels Newton's First Law of motion: “ Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it ”; 41 Malthus writes, “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity” (128), its momentum slowed only by the “checks” of famine, disease, and other manifestations of the misery and vice that result from the inability of the food supply to keep pace. Similarly, Newton's achievement was to show that the laws of terrestrial mechanics applied also to the heavenly bodies: the force that brought the apple to the ground was the same force that set the relative position of the moon and earth. So also Malthus can bring his principle of population to bear on a Godwinian future as remote in time as the moon is distant in space because, he claims, the principle of population, like gravity, is a universal law.

Thus the “Principle” of Malthus's title echoes Newton's “Principia” because Malthus intends his readers to understand that his refutation of Condorcet and Godwin is focused on their false understanding of what constitutes valid explanation. In his Preface to the Principia, Roger Cotes, with the Cartesians in mind, wrote that the “business of true philosophy is to derive the natures of things from causes truly existent, and to inquire after those laws on which the Great Creator actually chose to found this most beautiful Frame of the World, not those by which he might have done the same, had he so pleased.” 42 Malthus hoped to persuade his readers that he had embraced and followed this program of the “new philosophy,” that his predictions rested on fixed physical laws. As he writes in the Essay, these laws are “not remote, latent and mysterious; but near us, round about us, and open to investigation of every inquiring mind” (127), not the “occult,” “mysterious” explanations of Godwin and Condorcet that existed in a world that hypothetically could be but never was. Malthus's effort was not lost on his contemporaries, who styled him “The Newton of political philosophy.” 43

Obviously, the power and appeal of Malthus's Essay transcend his time. The source of the Essay 's enduring appeal cannot directly be traced to its evocation of the Principia, however: most readers today are not likely to hear the echoes of Newton's work, and those who do are not likely to be persuaded by them. 44 Nonetheless, the Essay 's enduring power does indirectly derive from Malthus's imitation of Newton.

Malthus's efforts to establish his principle of population as a uniform, immutable law that parallels Newton's law of gravity is the source of the Essay 's powerful simplicity, a facet of the Essay that derives from Malthus's imitation of Newton. According to the Essay, want resulting from the tendency of population growth to outpace food increases caused the evolution of man from hunter, to shepherd, to farmer (45); the “struggle for room and food” gave birth to the warrior class, caused the Mongolian invasions, and makes war inevitable (48-49); practices such as exposing aging parents and infant children that, in violating “the most natural principle of the human heart,” seem incomprehensible become predictable in light of the principle of population. Famine and plague, the intractability of poverty, the problem of pain: in the Essay, the explanation of all these is the principle of population. In short, Malthus's effort to establish for the principle of population uniformity and universality that parallels Newton's immutable, eternal laws of nature leads him to claim for his principle an influence considerably beyond what is required to refute the particulars of Condorcet's and Godwin's arguments. In the Essay, the principle of population is a single, centripetal cause that governs the laws of history, political economy, anthropology, and sociology. Especially for those frustrated by man's inability to solve the most basic problems and defeated by the complexities of human experience, the comprehensibility and comprehensiveness of the Essay make it almost irresistible. The effect results from Malthus's imitation of the Principia.

Similarly, Malthus's insistence on the need to subject axioms to the empirical test, in imitation of Newton, is the motivation for the descriptions that mark the Essay and make it vital—a lively read. Malthus moves easily (too easily from the point of view of the science he lays claim to) from Baconian exhortations on the primacy of empiricism to a method that draws on “what we daily see around us … actual experience … facts that come within the scope of every man's observation” (53) as relevant to the practice of it. Whatever the methodological validity of this procedure, the result is credible and persuasive descriptions of, for example, people at all social ranks weighing the pleasures of marriage and family against the possibility of the resulting economic hardship:

A man of liberal education, but with an income only just sufficient to enable him to associate in the rank of gentlemen, must feel absolutely certain, that if he marries and has a family, he shall be obliged, if he mixes at all in society, to rank himself with moderate farmers, and the lower class of tradesmen. The woman that a man of education would naturally make the object of his choice, would be one brought up in the same tastes and sentiments with himself, and used to the familiar intercourse of a society totally different from that to which she must be reduced by marriage. Can a man consent to place the object of his affection in a situation so discordant, probably, to her tastes and inclinations? Two or three steps of descent in society, particularly at this round of the ladder, where education ends, and ignorance begins, will not be considered by the generality of people, as a fancied and chimerical, but a real and essential evil. … These considerations undoubtedly prevent a great number in this rank of life from following the bent of their inclinations in an early attachment.

My readers might especially identify with the dilemma of this man of “liberal education,” but in the Essay we can find the same realistic depiction of human motivation at other “rounds of the ladder”:

The labourer who earns eighteen pence a day, and lives with some degree of comfort as a single man, will hesitate a little before he divides that pittance among four or five, which seems to be just sufficient for one. Harder fare and harder labour he would submit to, for the sake of living with the woman that he loves; but he must feel conscious, if he thinks at all, that, should he have a large family, and any ill luck whatever, no degree of frugality, no possible exertion of his manual strength, could preserve him from the heart rending sensation of seeing his children starve, or of forfeiting his independence, and being obliged to the parish for their support.

These pictures of “man reasoning,” whatever their value as empirical evidence, are more convincing than Godwin's portrait of a theoretical “Rational Man,” who is capable not only of defeating acquisitiveness but also of dismissing the claims of beauty and feeling to embrace intellectual pleasures. Furthermore, while the portraits in the Essay are of “economic man,” the economic motive is not presented in them as an end in itself but as the means to achieving a fuller humanity.

It is also Malthus's claim to the empiricist's habit of mind that is the source of his insistence in the Essay that we are blind to the reality before us—an insistence that often brings to the experience of reading the Essay the excitement of discovery. As have empiricists before him and since, Malthus claims that we are blinded by our preconceptions and prejudices. They have prevented us from seeing the operation of the principle of population. Our histories, Malthus says, are “histories only of the higher classes” (32); as a result, the cycle that begins with a food supply sufficient to support the population, that indirectly promotes an increase in population that eventually outruns the food supply, and that ends in the malnutrition of “the children of the poor” has not been “remarked by superficial observers” (31) and has been “less decidedly confirmed by experience, than might naturally be expected” (32). We are blinded, too, by stereotypes, as well as by class prejudice. Romantic notions cause us to “fix our eyes only on the warrior in the prime of life,” when we consider the putative happiness of the North American Indian, and distract us from the plight of the Indian woman, who, exhausted by the tribe's constant migrations in search of food and weakened by her own hunger, frequently miscarries (42). Similarly, only those observers like Malthus who “have attended to bills of mortality” (72) see the actual reality of country life, obscured as the true picture of this life is by our stereotypic notions of the healthy, happy farm hand:

The sons and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life, as they are described to be in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country, that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen, are upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must certainly be healthy exercise, are very rarely seen with any appearance of calves to their legs.

The reader is struck by the specificity of the observation—the calveless legs of the plough boy. Among the postulata and axioms, ratios, numbers, and talk of “the poor,” the fleshy particularity of the phrase startles. Apparently, Malthus cares enough to notice.

The close and sympathetic observations that mark the Essay complicate the ethos Malthus presents. They invite the reader to see him as more than the Newtonian scientist who brings the reality of laws and numbers to destroy Godwin's lofty abstractions. Nor is he only the “hard-hearted realist” who “tells it like it is.” In the sympathy suggested by their particularity, these observations lend credence to Malthus's claim that his attack on the Poor Laws was motivated by their tendency to veil the true causes of poverty, to lower the wages of labor and raise the price of food, and to cheat their recipients by not delivering the permanent relief they seem to promise in exchange for submission to bureaucratic regulation. If Malthus is to be faulted, it is for a failure in intellect—his inability to see how poverty is itself a cause of over-population, for instance—not for a failure in sympathy.

It is ironic that today Malthus is often thought of as an early social scientist—as “England's first political economist” or demographer—and the Essay remembered as the acknowledged catalyst for Darwin's and Wallace's theories of evolution by natural selection. The iconoclastic intentions and mechanistic view of man that we often associate with the social scientist, Malthus identified with Godwin, whose work he undertook to refute. And regardless of what Darwin and Wallace learned from the Essay or, more importantly, regardless of the use to which Herbert Spencer might have put it, Malthus would never have advocated seeing warrant in nature for England's political and social inequalities. Malthus should not be viewed as an incipient social scientist or a precursor of the social Darwinists, but, with Swift, Pope, Johnson, Reynolds, Gibbon, and Burke, as part of the mainstream of an English humanism that began with Colet and Erasmus, who, in the Renaissance, took inspiration from Cicero and Quintilian and reformed the curriculum of England's schools. 45 Malthus's motives are the moral ones and his method is the verbal art of the ideal of that tradition—the rhetorician. He judged the ideas and program of Condorcet and Godwin dangerous, and he undertook to refute them. In the course of his refutation, he rediscovered the principle of population:

The most important argument that I shall adduce is certainly not new. The principles on which it depends have been explained in part by Hume, and more at large by Dr. Adam Smith. It has been advanced and applied to the present subject, though not with its proper weight, or in the most forcible point of view, by Mr. Wallace: and it may probably have been stated by many writers that I have never met with. I should certainly therefore not think of advancing it again, though I mean to place it in a point of view in some degree different from any that I have hitherto seen, if it had ever been fairly and satisfactorily answered.

In other words, Malthus discovered the importance (“weight”) of an idea (the principle of population) whose significance (“force”) to a philosophical and political question important to his contemporaries had not been elucidated. By claiming that the principle was a universal, eternal law (placing it in a different “point of view”), he gave to it new meaning as a centripetal law of history. This seems to me a just statement of Malthus's achievement, and it is a distinctively rhetorical one. 46

1798; rpt. London, Royal Economic Society: Macmillan, 1926. All quotations from Malthus's Essay on Population in this paper are taken from this edition.

Review of Principles of Political Economy considered with a View to their Practical Application, 2nd ed., Edinburgh Review 64 (1837): 483.

See Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951) for a discussion of this response.

New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), 1: 326-27, quoted in Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 103.

Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and ed. Friedrich Engels (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1912), 1: 675; Downs, Books That Changed the World (New York: New American Library, 1956).

The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits (Oxford: World's Classics, 1947), 161.

The Essay has been analyzed by political scientists, economists, demographers, and historians, but, for the most part, these scholars ignore the contribution Malthus's rhetorical skill made to his success. Exceptions to this generalization are John Maynard Keynes, who notes that the first Essay “is bold and rhetorical in style with much bravura of language and sentiment” and William D. Grampp who points out that what gave the Essay “its arresting quality” was the way the arguments “were put forward, the way they were brought into relation with each other, and the way they were employed to reduce the work of Godwin to a pathetic ruin. Malthus's Essay is a marvelous piece of rhetoric.” Neither writer goes beyond the observation of the rhetorical power of the Essay to consider the specific causes of it, however. See Keynes, Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1933), 117; and Grampp, “Malthus and His Contemporaries,” History of Political Economy 6 (1974): 294.

It is to Malthus's credit that economists and demographers have found so much in the Essay (especially in the 1803 and subsequent editions) seminal to their disciplines that today “the Essay is regarded only as a treatise on economics,” as J. M. Pullen observes with dismay. I do not intend to denigrate either Malthus's contributions or the efforts of modern scholars who have paid homage to them. Nonetheless, language such as the following from Joseph J. Spengler, “Malthus sought to fashion cybernetic systems of collective control over fertility systems, generating feedbacks which would, in his opinion, give rise to prudential behavior respecting marriage and fertility,” even while it frames Malthus's place and contribution for demographers and economists, misleadingly pictures Malthus as a demographer or economist in front of a computer terminal attempting to create a model useful to a social engineer. But whatever contribution Malthus made to economics and demography was an incidental by-product of his goal, which was victory over Godwin, and his intentions, which were moral. See Pullen, “Malthus' Theological Ideas and Their Influence on his Principle of Population,” History of Political Economy 13 (1981): 52; Spengler, “Malthus on Godwin's Of Population, ” Demography 8 (1971): 10.

James Bonar, Malthus and His Work (1885; rpt. London: Frank Cass, 1966), 7.

Malthus cannot and does not claim to have “discovered” the principle of population. In 1752, Hume pointed out the tendency of population “to more than double every generation,” restrained to greater or lesser degree depending on a country's agriculture and government, and Robert Wallace noted the importance of food supply and governmental encouragements to marriage as determinants of population. Passages such as the following from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations anticipate many passages in Malthus: “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.” (See An Essay on the Principle of Population: Text, Sources, and Background Criticism, ed. Philip Appleman [New York: Norton, 1976], 3-7 where the relevant passages are conveniently reproduced.) Malthus himself acknowledges the contribution of Hume, Wallace and Smith in the Essay's first chapter, noting that the “most important argument that I shall adduce is certainly not new” (8). Malthus's contribution is the dramatic way in which he establishes the significance of the principle—that it is fatal to the predictions of Enlightenment optimists.

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (3rd ed., 1797; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1946); Condorcet, Sketch trans. June Barraclough and introd. Stuart Hampshire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955).

Godwin, Political Justice, 2:16; see also 233-304 for Godwin's views on religion and government and 420-67 for his attack on unlimited property rights and his advocacy of a system of equality.

Godwin, Political Justice, 1: 24.

The Monthly Review 28 (Sept., 1798): 2.

The Annual Review; and History of Literature 2 (1803): 295.

Karl Marx, Capital, 1: 676.

Throughout the Essay, Malthus insists that the Poor Laws indirectly lower the wage of labor because their promise to support a needy family lessens the preventive check, promotes population, increases the supply of (child) laborers, and, thus, lowers the wage. He also accuses “farmers and capitalists” of “growing rich from the real cheapness of labour” during periods of stable wages and rising costs and of a “conspiracy” to repress wages and to keep the causes of lower real wages (population and inflation) from the laborer. Eliminating the Poor Laws will increase labor's understanding of its plight and enable workers to act on their own behalf to direct their fate. (See Essay, 34-36 and 85-86, for instance.)

Annual Review 2 (1803): 295.

Annual Review 2 (1803): 292 and 295.

The Newtonian's side in the controversy is presented in terms contemporary to Malthus in Roger Cotes's Preface to the second edition of the Principia (1713), a preface which was commissioned by Newton's publishers to counter the continuing influence of Descartes' theory. The Preface was also included in the 1726 edition of the Principia, which Malthus owned. In this paper I quote from the standard, modern edition of the eighteenth-century translation of the Principia, that is, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, 1729; rev. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1946). This edition includes Cotes's famous Preface (xx-xxxiii). For more information on Cotes's Preface and details on the controversy, see Cajori's “An Historical and Explanatory Appendix” in this edition, 629-32.

Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 360.

Quoted in Bonar, Malthus and His Work, 407-08.

“Nowhere,” Howell notes of the eighteenth century, “is it more certain that the historical study of the logics and rhetorics used as textbooks in a given century will make rich contributions to an understanding of the literary works produced at that time,” as Howell demonstrates in his study of the influence of Duncan's Elements on Jefferson's composition of the Declaration of Independence. See Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 348; and Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 18 (1961): 463-84.

Elements of Logic, English Linguistics 1500-1800 (A Collection of Facsimile Reprints), ed., R. C. Alson, No. 203 (1748; Menston, England: Scolar Press), 148. Malthus's copy of Duncan's Elements (1752) and his copy of the 1726 edition of the Principia are part of the Malthus Library at Jesus College, Cambridge. See The Malthus Library Catalogue: The Personal Collection of Thomas Robert Malthus at Jesus College, Cambridge (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983).

Duncan, 146.

Duncan, 340.

Duncan, 330-31.

Duncan, 341-42.

Duncan, 275.

Duncan, 177 and 185.

Duncan, 187-88.

Duncan, 224-25.

Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 361.

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 148.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles, 395-96.

Samuel M. Levin, “Malthus and the Idea of Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 106.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles, 546.

The Meditations and Selections from the Principles of Rene Descartes, trans. John Veitch (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1903), 192.

Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay, rev. ed. (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1932), 114-16, 160-63.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles, Preface to the First Edition, xvii-xviii.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles, 13. The parallel of Newton's First Law to Malthus's law of population increase is made by Anthony Flew, “The Structure of Malthus' Population Theory,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 35 (1957): 16-17.

Cotes's Preface, xxvii.

The Annual Review; and History of Literature, 6 (1807), 351.

Fredrick Rosen, for example, observes that Malthus attempts “the substitution of a utopian method of inquiry for [Godwin's] utopian theory of society,” “The Principle of Population as Political Theory: Godwin's Of Population and the Malthusian Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 38.

Works on the ideal of the rhetorician in the Renaissance are too well known to require, and too numerous to permit, mention, but for the humanist tradition in the eighteenth century of which I think Malthus is a part, see Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

I thank John A. Campbell of the University of Washington, Tom Clayton and Tom Scanlan, both of the University of Minnesota, John Harrison of the Old Library, Jesus College, Cambridge, and Eileen Dugliss Walzer for reading, correcting, and commenting thoughtfully on this paper in its earlier stage.

Cite this page as follows:

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Economic Growth and the Poor in Malthus' Essay on Population

Utilitarianism in a Theological Context

An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798, 1st ed.]

• Thomas Robert Malthus (author)

This is the first edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. In this work Malthus argues that there is a disparity between the rate of growth of population (which increases geometrically) and the rate of growth of agriculture (which increases only arithmetically). He then explores how populations have historically been kept in check.

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An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson 1798). 1st edition.

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Critical Responses

William Godwin

A lengthy and belated reply to Malthus by the radical individualist Godwin. Whereas Malthus took a pessimistic view of the pressures of population growth, Godwin was more optimistic about the capacity of people to limit the growth of their families.

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Econlib Article

Morgan Rose

Thomas Robert Malthus is arguably the most maligned economist in history. For over two hundred years, since the first publication of his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus’ work has been misunderstood and misrepresented, and severe, alarming predictions have been attached to his…

Malthus had no objection to the idea that wealth derived from manufacturing production could, subject to certain hindrances, be exchanged to increase the amount of food available. He seems only to have misjudged the degree to which those hindrances would be reduced over time. He did not recognize…

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Ross Emmett

While many liberty-loving economists are happy to correct the criticisms of Smith, many are equally happy to criticize Malthus for the Malthusian trap, not realizing that the usual portrayal of Malthus is equally false. Malthus shares far more with Smith than most expect. He is, in many ways, as…

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Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.

By Victor Kumar

Dr. Kumar is a philosophy professor at Boston University who writes frequently about morality and progress.

JD Vance has repeatedly said that Americans aren’t having enough children. Other right-wing figures agree with him. Elon Musk, broadening the complaint, has said that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.

This doesn’t mean adopting the conservative case wholesale. Progressives need to develop their own version of pronatalism. It should stress the need for government benefits and social services like paid parental leave and subsidized child care while defending the right to abortion and rejecting the traditionalism and nativism that too often characterize the position on the right.

Skepticism about pronatalism is understandable, since the position frequently comes packaged with regressive ideas about race and gender. Prominent pronatalists like Tucker Carlson have spoken of the need to resist the “great replacement,” in which white people will be displaced by people of other races. Some proposals for increasing fertility rates call for outlawing abortion and restoring a culture in which women marry young and stay out of the work force, “freeing” them to have veritable broods of children.

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An essay on the principle of population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions

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The real winner of Venezuela’s election urges the regime to face facts

A peaceful transfer of power is still possible, says edmundo gonzález.

I HAVE BEEN been a public servant of Venezuela all my life—a career diplomat whose service culminated during the presidency of Hugo Chávez as ambassador to Argentina.

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