Malthus, Thomas Robert

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834), British political economist, pioneer demographer, and Christian moral scientist. Malthus was born near Dorking, Surrey, on February 14, 1766. He was educated privately at a Dissenting academy before entering Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784 to prepare for a career as an Anglican clergyman. At Cambridge his studies centred mainly on mathematics. After graduation in 1788 he spent the next ten years as a country curate, during which period he wrote the first version of the work that was to confer on him fame and notoriety in equal measure: An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

This anonymous work was originally designed as a contribution to a debate provoked by the French Revolution on human perfectibility and the prospects for social progress. Malthus advanced his population principle to show that the unremitting tendency of population to outstrip the means of subsistence placed a permanent constraint on improvement in living conditions for the mass of society. It also explained the persistence of war, pestilence, and famine as the main positive checks operating on death rates, and abortion, prostitution, and infanticide as the chief preventive checks operating on marriage and birth rates. Hence Malthus’s polemical conclusion at this stage that vice and misery were permanent features of the human condition and could not be remedied by changes in external circumstances. Another controversial feature of Malthus’s position was his advocacy of the gradual abolition of the unconditional right to poor relief on grounds of the encouragement it gave to population growth.

The success of this first essay encouraged Malthus to publish a much enlarged and more moderate version of his argument in 1803, in which he assembled ethnographic and statistical evidence designed to show the principle of population at work in different types of society. He also added a third category of preventive check to vice and misery, namely “moral restraint” (delayed marriage accompanied by sexual continence). It now became the ideal constructive solution to the moral and political dilemmas posed by the population principle. Neo-Malthusians—those who accepted his diagnosis while denying the efficacy of his remedies—later added birth control to delayed marriage, but Malthus regarded this as an “unnatural” practice that interfered with the plan of a beneficent deity in making necessity the mother of invention.

On the strength of the second essay Malthus was appointed professor at the East India College at Haileybury, an establishment created to educate those destined to enter the Indian civil service. It was here that he taught political economy for the rest of his life, working out original variations on the theories advanced by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776). Arising out of the population principle was an understanding of what later became known as the law of diminishing returns in agriculture and the theory of rent as a special form of income attached to landownership. Attention to the peculiarities of agriculture as an economic activity lent an agrarian bias to many of Malthus’s opinions. In his contributions to the debate on the Corn Laws in 1814-1815, Malthus lent his support to a moderate case for agricultural protection and national self-sufficiency on security grounds. This was the source of one of several disagreements with his friend, David Ricardo, that were conducted in correspondence and competing pamphlets. In addition to controversies on currency questions and free trade, Malthus engaged in a long-standing dispute with Ricardo on the causes and remedies for the depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He held that unemployment should be reduced by maintaining a high level of public expenditure and by encouraging the consumption of non-productive luxuries and personal services.

Malthus was slow to place his version of the Principles of Political Economy (1820) before the public, and when he did so he found it necessary to combat the rival theories of his friend, Ricardo, and the small group of disciples that had formed around Ricardo’s ideas. Although Malthus was judged by orthodox political economists to have lost many of his arguments with Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes reversed this verdict in the course of formulating his own theory of unemployment in the 1930s. Although many of Malthus’s specific ideas as a demographer have been superseded, he is still regarded as one of the figures who defined the territory explored by subsequent research. To a wider public, Malthus’s posthumous reputation is connected with the theory of natural selection in biology of Charles Darwin. Darwin and the co-discoverer of the theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, both expressed indebtedness to the Malthusian population principle as containing a crucial insight into the mechanisms underlying natural selection and the struggle for survival in the plant and animal kingdom. Malthus died near Bath on December 23, 1834.