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ABSTRACT
This contribution analyses the scientific and political meaning of the concept of ‘population’ within Thomas Robert Malthus’ thought. It is here argued that by encapsulating ‘population’ in a scientific principle, the author not only aimed at contrasting radical and revolutionary theories of his time; he was also looking for a renovation of the role principles hold in scientific reasoning. He considered this crucial for delineating a plausible science for such an elusive political object as society. Through an examination of key passages of Malthus’ theoretical production – his critique of previous definitions of ‘population’, his reassessment of the natural history of society, and the use of selected metaphors to explain his political thought – it is possible to observe how the author attempted to naturalize society and the inequalities arising from its historical laws. As shown in the conclusions, Malthus’ scientific and political effort was directed towards questioning possibilities to reduce the history of social relations to a path of rational progress, which is consistent with the way he re-conceptualized ‘population’ as regarding the fate of the people and their chances to transform the future in the plausible outcome of their political action in the present.
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Notes
1 The Analytical Review 28 (1798): 119.
2 Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty. The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979); Mark Philp, ‘Introduction’, Id. (ed.) The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–17; Jennifer Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution 1785–1820 (London, New-York: Routledge, 2000), 60ss; Gregory Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2007), 47ss.
3 Gregory Claeys, ‘Malthus and Godwin: Rights, Utility, and Productivity’, in New Perspectives on Malthus, ed. Robert Mayhew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 52–73. Taking into account Malthus’ rupture with the Enlightenment, as well as his critique of progress as part of the urgency to neutralize popular and radical expectations of a future freed from want, can also help escape the interpretation of Malthus as merely a ‘pessimist’, opposed to ‘optimist’ social and economic thinkers. See Robert Mayhew, Malthus: Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 65ss; Lina Weber, ‘Doom and Gloom: The Future of the World at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, History. The Journal of the Historical Association 106, no. 371 (2021): 409–428.
4 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.
5 Edward Anthony Wrigley, ‘Corn and Crisis: Malthus on the High Price of Provisions’, Population and Development Review 25, no. 1 (1999): 121–128 rightly underlines the mainly pre-industrial organization of the society Malthus observed; still, his interpretation bears the risk to underestimate Malthus’ theorization of the transition to manufacturing and industrial society, as well as the political originality of its contribution to political economy as a discipline.
6 Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People. The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (London, New-York: Norton, 1988); Jacopo Bonasera, ‘“Guerra al popolo d’Inghilterra”. T.R. Malthus tra popolo, popolazione e mob’, Storia del pensiero politico 2 (2023): 217–236; on the French political context of the time Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 5ss.
7 The revolutionary turn opened a political confrontation on the possibility to refer to ‘nature’ against the lack of rights accorded to individuals under existing regimes. Malthus’ case for the natural status of the principle of population is to be understood in this conceptual framework: John Avery, Poverty, Progress, Population. Re-Reading Condorcet, Godwin, Malthus (London, New-York: Routledge, 1997); Thomas Horne, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605–1834 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 200ss.
8 Ètienne de Condillac had first systematised the functional role principles hold in scientific systems: ‘Celles qui rendent raison des autres s’appellent principes, et le systême est d’autant plus parfait, que les principes sont en plus petit nombre’ (Ètienne de Condillac, ‘Traité des systêmes’ (1749), in OEuvres philosophiques de l’abbé de Condillac (Paris, 1792), IV, 1). In his times, Malthus was not the only one innovating the lexicon of social sciences to give them a systematic fashion. In 1822, when publishing the second edition of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham affirmed that ‘principle […] is applied to any thing which is conceived to serve as a foundation or beginning to any series of operations’ (Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: Pickering 1823), 3). See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 391–395; Paola Rudan, ‘Society as a Code. Bentham and the Fabric of Order’, History of European Ideas 42, no. 1 (2016): 39–54.
9 Thomas Robert Malthus, ‘Letter to David Ricardo’ (26 Jan. 1817), Piero Sraffa, ed., The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1973), 122.
10 Thomas Robert Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (1820) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11, 13.
11 David Hume, ‘That Politics may be Reduced to a Science’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume in Four Volumes (Edinburgh: Black, 1854), 11–27; see Luca Cobbe, L’arcano della società. L’opinione e il segreto della politica moderna (Milano: Mimesis, 2020), 50ss.
12 On the temporal dimension of the principle of population see Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 108; Deborah Valenze, ‘The Tortoise and the Hare. Thomas Robert Malthus as Natural Philosopher’, in An Essay on the Principle of Population. The 1803 Edition, ed. Shannon C. Stimson (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2018), 497–515; Fredrik A. Jonsson, ‘Island, Nation, Planet: Malthus in the Enlightenment’, in New Perspectives on Malthus, ed. Robert J. Mayhew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 128–152.
13 This is one of the fundamental thesis broadly discussed in Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty. An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223ss.
14 Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973) (London: Routledge, 2013), 352, 290. See Maurizio Ricciardi, ‘Tempo, ordine, potere. Su alcuni presupposti concettuali del programma neoliberale’, Scienza&Politica XXIX, no. 57 (2017): 11–30. Already in 1943, Hayek had approached the topic of the correct foundation of ‘social sciences’ in an article in which he clearly stated the difference between facts of the natural and social order. See Friedrich von Hayek, ‘The Facts of the Social Sciences’, Ethics, LIV, no. 1 (1943): 1–13.
15 Fredrik A. Jonsson, and Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity. A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), 124ss.
16 See Matthew S. Anderson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Balance of Power’, in Studies in Diplomatic History, eds. Ragnhild Hatton, and Matthew S. Anderson (London: String Press, 1970), 180–195; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimora: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 139ss. On the ‘experimental culture’ Steven Shapin, Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 332ss.
17 Malthus, Essay (1798), 11.
18 Rudolph Binion, ‘“More Men than Corn”: Malthus Versus the Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 564–569.
19 Malthus, Essay (1798), 29.
20 David Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, in The Philosophical Works: 414–415.
21 Hume, Of the Populousness, 414.
22 The point is amply discussed in Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator. The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 12–14.
23 Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, in Ancient and Modern Times (Edinburgh: Constable, 1753), 12.
24 Wallace, Dissertation, 14.
25 Robert B. Luehrs, ‘Population and Utopia in the Thought of Robert Wallace’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1987): 313–335.
26 Robert Wallace, Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence (London, 1761), 113.
27 Wallace also anticipated key aspects of Malthus’ later theodicy, as natural limits to progress became the practical justification of the existence of ‘scarcity’, and the proof of God’s plan to stimulate individuals in their moral and material improvement. See Dan LeMahieu, ‘Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 3 (1979): 467–474; Anthony M. Waterman, ‘Malthus as a Theologian: the First Essay and the Relation Between Political Economy and Christian Theology’, in Malthus Past and Present, eds. Jacques Dupaquier, Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, Eugene Grebenik (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 195–209; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement. The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 73–80; John Pullen, ‘Variables and Constants in the Theology of T.R. Malthus’, History of Economic Review 63, no. 1 (2016): 21–32.
28 Malthus, Essay (1798), 62.
29 Adam Smith, ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. Roy Campbel, and Andrew S. Skinner (Oxford: University Press, 1976), 98.
30 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 155–156.
31 Ibid., 96, 22. See Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30.
32 Malthus, Essay (1798), 125.
33 Jack R. Weinstein, ‘Sympathy, Difference and Education: Social Unity in the Work of Adam Smith’, Economics and Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2006): 79–111. Edward Hundert, ‘Sociability and Self-Love in the Theatre of Moral Sentiments: Mandeville to Adam Smith’, in Economy, Polity, and Society. British Intellectual History 1750–1950, eds. Stefan Collini, Robert Whatmore, Bryan Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31–47.
34 I here rely on the interpretation provided in Garreth Stedman Jones, ‘An End to Poverty. The French Revolution and the Promise of a World Beyond Want’, in The Migration of Ideas, eds. Roberto Scazzieri, Raffaella Simili (Sagamore: Watson Publishing International, 2008), 59–72.
35 Malthus, Essay. The 1803 Edition, 33.
36 See Niall O’Flaherty, ‘Malthus and the History of Population’, in An Essay. The 1803 Edition: 477–496.
37 Highly circulating at the time were the journals of Captain James Cook’s voyages made between 1768 and 1780, now to be consulted in John Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, IV Voll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955–1974); Malthus used these accounts extensively and, with his diaries of his 1799 voyage between Germany, Russia and Scandinavia, he himself contributed to the literary genre. See Patricia James, ed., The Travel Diaries of Thomas Robert Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).
38 Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Jean Starobinski, Le remède dans le mal: critique et légitimation de l’artifice à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
39 O’Flaherty, The History of Population.
40 Malthus, Essay. The 1803 Edition, 43.
41 Ibid., 29.
42 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Éuropéens dans le deux Indes, 12 Voll., IX (Paris: Amable Costes, 1820), 28.
43 Raynal, Histoire, IX, 32.
44 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Barbarian, Savages and Empires’, V. 4, Id. Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 226–328; Alessandro Pandolfi, ‘Tra due Imperi. L’Histoire des deux Indes e il colonialismo moderno’, Scienza&Politica, XXIV, no. 47 (2012): 181–197; Matthew Sharpe, ‘From Amy Allen to Abbé Raynal: Critical Theory, the Enlightenment and Colonialism’, Critical Horizons 20, no. 2 (2019): 178–199.
45 Malthus, Essay. The 1803 Edition, 47.
46 Ibid., 46.
47 In doing so, Malthus was directly referring to Gibbon’s earlier accounts provided in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There, Gibbon had made the state of the ‘barbarians’ coincide with that of the ‘primitives’, paving the way for the full redefinition of the previous stadial canon on which Malthus then built his own argument. Unlike Gibbon, however, Malthus was not interested in establishing a direct connection and continuity between the freedom of the barbarians and that of the moderns. See John G.A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Shepherds: the Stages of Society in the “The Decline and Fall”’, History of European Ideas II (1981): 193–202; Maria Luisa Pesante, ‘Il sistema commerciale di Malthus tra storia e natura’, Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi XXXI (1997): 189–213.
48 Malthus, Essay. The 1803 Edition, 21.
49 John Poynter, Society and Pauperism. English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London: Routledge, 1969), 29.
50 Malthus, Essay (1798), 68.
51 The essential influence played by the Newtonian language and methodology in the formation of social sciences has become in the years the object of many studies. See, at least, Albion W. Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology. A Study in the Methodology of Social Sciences (Ontario: Batoche Books, 1907); I. Bernard Cohen, The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: Some Critical and Historical Perspectives (Boston: Kluvert Academic Publishers, 1993); Sergio Cremaschi, ‘L’illuminismo scozzese e il newtonianismo morale’, in Passioni, interessi, convenzioni, eds. Marco Geuna, and Maria Luisa Pesante (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1992), 41–76; Robert Striner, ‘Political Newtonianism: The Cosmic Model of Politics in Europe and America’, The William and Mary Quaterly 52, no. 4 (1995): 583–608.
52 Malthus, Essay. The 1803 Edition, 286.
53 Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990), 66ss; Matilde Cazzola, ‘Robert Young and the Philanthropic Science of Social Happiness’, History of Political Thought 44, no. 1 (2023): 116–152.
54 Malthus, Essay (1798), 57.
55 Thomas Robert Malthus, ‘Appendix’ (1817), in Id. An Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 374; see Gunnar Heinsohn, and Otto Steiger, The Rationale Underlying Malthus’s Theory of Population, in Malthus. Past and Present, 223–232.
56 John Weyland, The Principles of Population and Production (London: Baldwin, 1816), 16–17.
57 Robert Brown, The Nature of Social Laws: Machiavelli to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 130ss.