Thomas Robert Malthus

English political economist

• Born: February 13, 1766
• Birthplace: The Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey, England
• Died: December 23, 1834
• Place of death: St. Catherine, near Bath, Somerset, England

The original professor of political economy, Malthus will be forever linked to discussions of the population problem. Terms such as “Malthusian economics” and “neo-Malthusianism” have achieved a permanent place in the English language and reflect the controversy that his work engendered.

Early Life

Thomas Robert Malthus was born on his father’s estate. Some biographies incorrectly list February 14, the day of his baptism, as his birthdate. His father, Daniel Malthus, was an Oxford-educated lawyer and a gentleman of some means, as well as an intellectual of the Enlightenment and a devotee of the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Malthus grew up in a genteel, intellectually invigorating environment provided by his father, who was caught up in the exciting ideas of the Age of Reason and the French Revolution. Indeed, Malthus’s great work was initially a reaction to many of those ideas, especially the notion that through the use of reason, humankind could achieve perfection. Privately educated under a series of tutors, Malthus entered Jesus College of Cambridge in 1784 when he was eighteen. There he won prizes in Latin and English grammar, but his chief study was, as his father had suggested, mathematics. In that area, he was graduated as Ninth Wrangler (high honors) and was awarded a fellowship.

Upon graduation, Malthus took religious orders in 1788 and became a pastor in the Church of England, taking charge of the rectory in the village of Surrey in 1793. In 1804, he gave up his fellowship and married Harriet Eckersall, his cousin and eleven years his junior. A devoted family man, his home life appears to have been quite stable, and his wife was reputed to have been a charming hostess. He sired three children—two sons and a daughter who died when she was seventeen, the one note of tragedy in his personal life.

Malthus was a handsome man, with an aristocratic nose, sharp eyes, and a high forehead. He dressed as a gentleman of the day and wore his curly hair short with sideburns. Contemporary sources generally indicate that his personality, despite the heated controversy that ensnared him, was genuinely amiable and pleasant. Even his worst enemies frequently noted his sincerity and fairness. He was, by all reports and in spite of the terrible things that have been said about him, a gentle man.

Life’s Work

In 1805, Malthus received an appointment as professor of history and political economy at the newly founded East India College, the purpose of which was to train civil servants for work in India. This was the first such professorship established, and Malthus retained it until his death. He was a dedicated teacher, called “Pop” by his students.

By the time he left religious work for education, Malthus had already written the book that resulted in his historical significance: 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 (1798). Despite his other contributions, it was this work that marked him as a man of controversy. The original work was fairly short and published anonymously, but it became widely read, quickly sold out, and generated considerable discussion, not all of it positive. From 1799 to 1802, Malthus traveled widely throughout Europe, going as far as Russia, collecting additional data on his theory that the growth of population will always outstrip the production of food. The second edition, of 1803, was greatly expanded, and while critics still quote from the first edition, it is the 1803 version that represents the fuller accounting of Malthusian principles. During his lifetime, An Essay on the Principle of Population went through six editions, and extracts and complete renditions remain in print.

Malthus was both attacked and admired in his day. In 1819, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1821 he became a charter member of the Political Economy Club, along with David Ricardo, his close friend, and James Mill. In 1824, he received admission as a royal associate into the Royal Academy of Literature. Also a member of the French Institute and the Royal Academy in Berlin, in 1834 he became a Charter Fellow of the Statistical Society. During the Christmas vacation of 1834, he and his family visited his father-in-law at Claverton, Bath. There, on December 23, Malthus died of a heart attack. He is buried in Bath Abbey. His wife survived him by thirty years.

Students of Malthus and Malthusian economics can easily become confused by the controversy surrounding Malthus and particularly by arguments advanced in his name that actually bear no relation to the man or his ideas. It is best to begin by asking how did Malthus come to write An Essay on the Principle of Population and what did he say in it? As the subtitle suggests, Malthus wrote in response to certain ideas put forth by the reforming Englishman William Godwin and the equally perfectionistic Frenchman, the Marquis de Condorcet. Simply stated, Godwin and Condorcet believed that with the use of reason and education there could be no end to human progress. They both foresaw continued physical, intellectual, and moral advancement until a perfect society resulted. In discussing these ideas with his father, Malthus entered certain objections to such a happy view, and his father suggested that he put them in writing. Thus came about the first An Essay on the Principle of Population.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Malthus admired science and mathematics, and he believed in a natural law that would inevitably prevent human perfection. The secret lay in the mathematical ratios that he understood to govern the growth of population and the production of food. Population, he said, increased geometrically, while food or agriculture could be increased only arithmetically. Thus, human population would increase by the following ratio: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so forth. Food, however, would increase thus: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. To many in this early age of science, and an age so eager to discover natural laws, the simple proof that Malthus offered seemed inescapable: There would never be enough food to feed the world’s population.

To the question of what could be done about this situation, Malthus had little in the way of encouraging answers. In his day, there were no dependable methods of birth control (which was at any rate regarded as immoral), and abortion was illegal. The only natural limits to population growth appeared to lie in war, disease, and poverty. This depressing situation gave rise to attacks on Malthus and to his being called the Dismal Parson and to political economy becoming known as the Dismal Science. There were simply no checks on population that Malthus could find that did not come under the heading of either vice or misery. In the second edition in 1803, Malthus introduced the notion that a possible curb on population growth might rest in what he called “moral restraint,” by which he meant the social responsibility to bear no more children than parents could properly maintain. Although the addition of moral restraint is the greatest change that Malthus made in his theory, the inherent weakness of this restriction, because it depends on individual control, is and was obvious.

Viciously attacked during his lifetime, Malthus and his ideas actually became even less popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. Marxists were particularly bitter in finding that Malthusian economics was merely a tool of the capitalist society to keep the poor oppressed. Humanitarians found the theory hard-hearted and mean-spirited and rejected it vigorously. More important, the mathematical analysis employed by Malthus simply did not withstand rigorous scrutiny. Food, critics observed, was organic, and thus it also increased geometrically. Additionally, technological advances made in agriculture seemed almost to eliminate hunger. By 1900, Malthus was generally dismissed as a pseudoscientist who had leaped to a gross generalization. The only school of thought that continued to embrace Malthus was that of some social Darwinists (and, indeed, Charles Darwin had been influenced by Malthus) who found the population theory acceptable in the light of their emphasis on the struggle for survival.

In the twentieth century, however, Malthus emerged as an important symbol in a concept known as neo-Malthusianism. Ironically, this movement advocated birth control, which Malthus opposed as immoral. Nevertheless, after World War II it became apparent that in many areas of the world, particularly in underdeveloped countries, population was growing at an alarming rate. As the prospect, and often the reality, of famine loomed in Africa and Asia, calls for government-sponsored birth control programs mounted. Some attempts were made in India and China. The problem, however, continues, as does the image of Malthus in this monumentally important issue.

Significance

Whatever the flaws of his analysis, Thomas Robert Malthus must be regarded as the founder of demographic studies. In addition, he was an important and influential figure in the development of early nineteenth century economic thought. His influence on Darwin was certainly of enormous importance, as was his work on the diminishing returns of agricultural production. The Malthusian legacy is most evident in the continued use and misuse of his name, which has become synonymous with population studies and the population problem.

Bibliography

Avery, John. Progress, Poverty, and Population: Re-reading Condorcet, Godwin and Malthus. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Traces the history of the debate during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries between utopian optimists, such as Condorcet and Godwin, and pessimists, such as Malthus, about the effects of population growth upon society.

Dupaquier, Jacques, et al., eds. Malthus Past and Present. New York: Academic Press, 1983. A selection of papers presented in 1980 at the International Conference on Historical Demography. Contains useful information on the influences on Malthus, the conditions of his time, and the neo-Malthusian movement.

Elwell, Frank W. A Commentary on Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population as Social Theory. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. An analysis of the essay that seeks to eliminate some of the dogma and misinterpretation surrounding Malthus’s theories and present his ideas with more subtlety and complexity. Includes a reprint of the original essay.

James, Patricia. Population Malthus: His Life and Times. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. An excellent biography.

Meek, Ronald L., ed. Marx and Engles on Malthus: Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engles Dealing with the Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953. The Marxist condemnation of Malthus in the nineteenth century.

Petersen, William. Malthus. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Reprint. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999. An intellectual biography that properly sets the work of Malthus into the context of early nineteenth century thought.

Turner, Michael, ed. Malthus and His Time. London: Macmillan, 1986. Further selections, somewhat more technical, from the 1980 international conference on historical demography.

Wood, John Cunningham, ed. Thomas Robert Malthus. 4 vols. London: Croom Helm, 1986. A detailed and quite helpful overview of the work and importance of Malthus, including selections from contemporary sources to the 1980’s.