Malthus, Thomas Robert

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MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT

malthus and political conservatism
malthus, social history, and the birth of the social sciences
the verdict of history
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MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT (1766–1834), English economist and sociologist.

Thomas Robert Malthus was the son of an unusual Surrey country gentleman who personally knew, and was deeply influenced by, both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. Young Robert was educated at home (Rousseau opposed formal schooling) and then at Jesus College, Cambridge. Malthus's many writings can be viewed as sustained critiques of Enlightenment spirit of optimism and utopian reform within which he had been reared.

Some "know" Thomas Robert Malthus as the Briton who predicted the population explosion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Malthus actually argued the opposite, that "population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence." He identified many "positive checks" that ensured that population did not outrun food supply (by periodically eliminating unsustainable numbers, mostly among the "lowest orders of society"). These included famine, epidemics, wars, and—new to early-industrial Britain—"the silent though certain destruction of life in large towns and manufactories." The misunderstanding perhaps arises from Malthus's speculation that population, left to itself would grow faster (geometrically, i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …) than food production (which would grow arithmetically, i.e., 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 …). Malthus clarified that population is never left to itself, except on a newly discovered island.

Malthus admitted a small ameliorative role for "preventive" (voluntary) checks like late marriage and systematic sexual denial. (An ordained Anglican clergyman, Malthus did not endorse contraception.) By inducing the libidinous "hare" to sleep, "the tortoise [of food production] may have some chance." But broadly, humankind was doomed, by an immutable "law of misery," to bare subsistence.

malthus and political conservatism

The Essay on the Principle of Population was a widely read work that went through six editions by 1826. Ten of the first edition's nineteen chapters are polemical attacks on the optimism of radical contemporaries—William Godwin, Dr. Price, and the French revolutionary Marie-Jean de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet. They had argued that unlimited progress and the elimination of inequality was possible, once antiquated political institutions were swept away. Malthus, a political conservative, countered that revolution, or even institutional reform, would not help. Poverty stemmed from natural (not man-made) scarcities and hence could never disappear.

Malthus opposed state intervention to relieve poverty—making him a founder of modern-day conservatism. In his view, even parish charity and the Speenhamland bread subsidies (instituted in 1795 to save Britain from food riots) would only encourage paupers to start families, which would ultimately become victims of famine, or wards of the state. Malthus provided the British landed gentry "scientific" arguments against higher local taxes ("poor rates")—provoking Karl Marx to call him a "shameless sycophant of the ruling classes"—and provided future conservatives ammunition against the welfare state. In the short term, "Malthusianism" led indirectly to Britain's harsh Poor Law of 1834. Yet Malthus insisted that his prescriptions increased "the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people." Absence of poor relief may create a few cases of "very severe distress" but food-for-work programs for the unemployed would hurt the entire working population, by raising food prices and lowering wages.

The perceived coldness of Malthus's policy prescriptions earned him the ire of his contemporaries, the Romantic poets. Lord Byron condemned Malthus for "turning marriage into arithmetic" and ridiculed him on four occasions in Don Juan (1821). Even Tories like Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined the more progressive William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth in denouncing Malthus's heartlessness. Malthus countered that he was painting the true face of rural poverty, wryly noting that the "daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as described in romances."

malthus, social history, and the birth of the social sciences

Complaining that "the histories of mankind that we possess are, in general, histories only of the higher classes," Malthus called for "a faithful history" that would record changes in marriage age, fertility, and wages of agricultural labor. Malthus argued that such statistics were crucial because these poorer classes bore the brunt of nature's "positive checks," and in 1834 he cofounded the Statistical Society of London. If social, family, and agrarian history took another 150 years to emerge, the fault was scarcely Malthus's.

Second and subsequent editions of Malthus's Essay carefully documented "checks to population" recorded across many societies over many time periods—from ancient Greece to modern Siberia. Universal, timeless laws were derived from this quantitative or anthropological evidence, and predictions and policy prescriptions offered. Arguably, this made Malthus the world's first systematic social scientist. Errors can plausibly be attributed to poor data quality rather than deficient method. Barring Sweden, there were no regular censuses in 1800, and if they soon became the norm in Europe and America it was because Malthus highlighted their importance.

Though Malthus collected no data on nonhuman populations, his most enduring contribution, ironically, is to biological rather than social science. His population theory works far better for animal habitats (and is enshrined in the ecological concept of "carrying capacity") than it has done for human societies, capable of innovation. As Charles Darwin acknowledged in his Autobiography (1887), a chance encounter with Malthus's book in 1838 provided him the crucial mechanism for biological evolution—natural selection. Darwin, in his Origin of Species (1859), extrapolated the Malthusian "struggle for existence" to all species. The best-adapted members survive this struggle, and procreate; the least-adapted die.

It is scarcely known that Malthus was the world's first professional economist. Appointed in 1805 to the first-ever economics professorship (at the East India College, Haileybury), he held it till his death. While the Scottish economist Adam Smith's pioneering Wealth of Nations (1776) had promised growing prosperity through free trade and division of labor, Malthus's Principles of Political Economy (1820) recast economics as a "dismal science" struggling to reconcile unlimited needs with scarce resources. Though witnessing the tremendous productivity gains of the First Industrial Revolution, Malthus (and his friend David Ricardo) predicted declining wages and profits, higher food prices, and threats from grain imports—a declining, or at best a steady-state, economy.

the verdict of history

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to have borne out Enlightenment optimism, not Malthus. Food production and living standards more than kept pace with rapid population growth—even if famines and epidemics in nineteenth-century India and Ireland and, more recently, sub-Saharan Africa, have periodically vindicated Malthusian pessimism in specific locales. Some environmentalists, however, maintain that the jury is still out: Malthus's dire prophecies have not been refuted but merely postponed, because of unprecedented (and unsustainable) technological progress. For others like Amartya Sen, two centuries afford ample time to test any theory, and most famines have had political, not natural, causes. While it is tempting to see Malthus as a protoenvironmentalist, it should be remembered that his focus on the scarcity of natural resources influenced, without doubt, the nineteenth-century scramble for colonies.

As has been argued above, however, Malthus's historical significance does not rest on the validity of his demographic pronouncements. It is by shaping the early contours of conservatism (political and sexual), economics, and social science at large, that Malthus cast his shadow into, and beyond, the nineteenth century.

See alsoEconomists, Classical; Great Britain; Industrial Revolution, First.