Thomas Robert Malthus was born at his family's country home in Wotton, Surrey, on February 13, 1766. He was raised in a wealthy family, the sixth child of seven born to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus. His father, an eccentric liberal landowner who enjoyed studying philosophy and botany and maintained friendships with both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, educated Malthus at home until the age of ten. In 1782, after six years of study at Claverton Rectory near Bath, Malthus, then sixteen years old, was sent by his father to study under radical Unitarian Gilbert Wakefield. Two years later, he enrolled at Jesus College, Cambridge, and received his undergraduate degree in 1788. Despite a serious speech defect due to a cleft palate and harelip, Malthus earned awards for his declamations in Latin and English.
After being ordained by the Church of England, Malthus accepted an appointment as curate at Okewood in Surrey in 1789. He became a nonresident fellow of Jesus College in 1793, a position he acquiesced in 1804 when he married his cousin, Harriet Eckersall, with whom he had three children. In 1805 he became Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India Company College in Haileybury. He was also appointed rector of Walesby in Lancashire, a nonresident position he held the remainder of his life.
Malthus maintained a close relationship to his father until his father's death in 1800, and although often in disagreement, they corresponded regularly on a wide range of issues during Malthus's time away at school. Upon his graduation, Malthus returned to live with his parents, and the spirited debates between he and his father continued with new zeal. After one particular discussion in which Malthus's father praised and defended the perfectibility of humanity as espoused by utopian thinker William Godwin, Malthus was compelled to respond in detail. This written rejection of Godwin's optimistic understanding of human progress towards a utopian society resulted in Malthus's seminal work An Essay on the Principle of Population. At his father's urging, Malthus first published the work in 1798; he would revise it numerous times before his death in 1834.
In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus attacked the optimistic social vision that prevailed at the time, replacing utopian idealism with a starkly contrasting, dismal vision of the future. According to Malthus, whereas the population increased geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc.), food supply increased arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Left unchecked, the population would quickly expand well beyond available resources, thus resulting in misery and poverty for the masses. The overwhelming success of the book placed Malthus in the public limelight, and the well-written exposition of his population theory crushed utopian visions so completely that economics soon became known as "the dismal science."
Malthus did recognize certain checks that could at least retard the growth of the chasm between population and resources. He stated, "By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind." Actual population growth could be slowed by both "preventive" and "positive" checks. Preventive checks, which affect all social classes, include delay of marriage, sexual intercourse that did not result in procreation, such as homosexuality and use of contraception, and abortion. Positive checks, which fell mostly upon the poor, include famine, disease, war, and infanticide. Short-term increases in food supply could suspend suffering temporarily, but ultimately no human effort could save the masses from misery. In a later edition, Malthus modified his population checks by including "moral restraint," which is defined as postponed marriage and celibacy and offers some hope that the masses could be taught this restraint through education.
The social policy implications that Malthus drew from his population theory are found primarily in his call to abolish the Poor Laws, a national assistance program for the needy. According to Malthus, this benevolence was misplaced because it destroyed an important preventive check on population. He argued that if offered assistance, men would be more inclined to marry and have children that they could not support, thus placing more demand on the limited food supply and in turn causing even greater suffering. Malthus also believed that the Poor Laws encouraged laziness and idleness, and provided a "strong and immediate check to productive industry." At the time of his writing, England was dealing with high food prices and an increasing number of poor seeking assistance. The middle and upper classes were primed to hear Malthus's message to the poor: "They are themselves the cause of their own poverty; that the means of redress are in their own hands, and in the hands of no other persons whatever; that the society in which they live, and the government which presides over it, are totally without power in this respect."
Malthus continued to revise and expand An Essay on the Principle of Population, producing new editions in 1803, 1806, 1807, 1809, 1817, and 1826. His vast influence over the social reform of his time resulted in passage of the New Poor Law in 1834. Although it did not end all public support, by denying assistance to all able-bodied men, the new law was founded on the Malthusian principle that each man is solely responsible for his own family. Later in his career Malthus turned more attention to economical issues such as wealth, money supply, and measure of value, rent, and wages. A persuasive writer, he produced numerous other books and pamphlets on these subjects for a wide audience in hopes of influencing social policy. The most important work of his later years was published in 1820 as Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to their Practical Application.
Malthus died at Bath on December 29, 1834, just four months after the passage of the New Poor Law. Although his influence as a political economist had waned by the time of his death, his work as a population theorist continued to influence thinkers, including Charles Darwin, for years to come. Contrarily, Malthus was constantly faced with staunch opposition to his ideas. Godwin, whose utopian vision first inspired Malthus to write, called him "a dark and terrible genius that is ever at hand to blast all the hopes of mankind." For better or worse, clearly Malthusian ideals helped form the social culture of his lifetime and well beyond.
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