Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

Robert J. Mayhew explains complex economic ideas with clarity and shows that even though Malthus and his Essay are still remarkably well-known, his work is often an (unread) reference point. Mayhew underscores how Malthus's ideas are perpetually modern, and remarkably so., A stylish, well-written, exuberant, and cleverly conceived book. Malthus is a thoughtful and skillful achievement., Though critics saw Malthus as contemptuous of the poor and entrenched in his beliefs, Mayhew reveals him as a humane observer and insightful commentator, preoccupied with poverty and intent on reviewing his own earlier utterances, including his contentious 1803 claim that the poor deserved no place at life’s table. By his death in 1834, Malthus was an authoritative voice on population and economy, but his reputation--and notoriety--lived on in new versions of Malthusianism, including some, such as the advocacy of artificial contraception, he would never have endorsed. Indeed, Malthus was adopted as a bogeyman in post-1950s U.S. debates about ‘overpopulation,’ environment and security. Mayhew pushes beyond the stereotypes of Malthus to recover the historical reality...This is a compelling read., It is the wide range of techniques [the book] interweaves to recreate the unique fabric of Malthus’ intellectual life--including comparative biography, comparative literature and the study of contemporary journals--that make this a singularly rich portrait…[Mayhew] is surely right that an attention to the complexities of Malthus’ ideas and legacies will better equip us to deal with our present environmental challenges than will simplistic, self-edifying binaries., [A] fine book…Mayhew describes the continuously contested legacy of what it meant to be a Malthusian, to commend or condemn Malthusianism in the two centuries after the Essay [on the Principle of Population] was published. But his book is also inevitably about us--as we too are obliged to think about our numbers, about nature and its resources, and about policies for living in a finite world.

Robert J. Mayhew is Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at the University of Bristol.