1803 version which 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 which would inevitably prevent human perfection. The secret lay in the mathematical ratios which 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 which 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. While the addition of moral restraint is the greatest change that Malthus made in his theory, the inherent weakness of this restriction, since 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 which 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.

Summary

Whatever the flaws of his analysis, Thomas Robert Malthus must be regarded as the father 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

Appleman, Philip, ed. Thomas Robert Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population, Text Sources and Background Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976. Contains selections from Condorcet, Godwin, and the two important editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as well as responses, positive and negative, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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.

James, Patricia. Population Malthus: His Life and Times. London: Routledge and 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. 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.