Malthus, Thomas Robert

The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition

Thomas Robert Malthus, cleric, moral scientist and economist, was born near Guildford, Surrey. He entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784, graduated in mathematics as ninth Wrangler in 1788 and was a non-resident fellow of his college from 1793 until his marriage in 1804. Originally destined for a career in the Church of England, he became curate of Okewood in Surrey in 1796, and Rector of Walesby in Lincolnshire in 1803; but from 1805 until his death he served as professor of history and political economy at Haileybury College, then recently founded by the East India Company for the education of its cadets.

The source of Malthus’s reputation as a political economist lay in his Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798; but this essay was originally written to refute the ‘perfectibilist’ social philosophies of such writers as Godwin and Condorcet, and as such was developed within the context of an essentially Christian moral philosophy, as was all of Malthus’s writing. At the core of Malthus’s argument was his theory that

In the first edition of his Essay, Malthus identified the checks to population as either preventive (keeping new population from growing up) or positive (cutting down existing population); hence followed the bleak conclusion ‘that the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice’. In the second, much enlarged, edition (1803) he extended the category of preventive checks to include ‘moral restraint’, thus admitting the possibility of population being contained without either misery or vice as necessary consequences. Even when thus modified, Malthus’s population principle seemed to impose narrow limits to the possibilities of economic growth and social improvement, although he himself did not so intend it. Idealists and reformers consequently railed against the implications of the theory, but his fellow economists accepted both its premises and its logic and for most of the nineteenth century it remained one of the classical ‘principles of political economy’.

His population principle was not Malthus’s only contribution to economic thought: he was among the first to state (in 1815) the theory of rent as a surplus generally associated with the name of his friend and contemporary, David Ricardo. Both were followers of Adam Smith but Malthus’s development of Smith’s system differed significantly from Ricardo’s, notably in his use of supply and demand analysis in the theory of value as against Ricardo’s emphasis on labourquantities, and his explanation of the ‘historical fall’ of profits in terms of competition of capitals rather than by the ‘necessity of resort to inferior soils’ which Ricardo stressed.

Malthus and Ricardo debated at length ‘the possibility of a general glut’ of commodities. Ricardo argued for the validity of Say’s Law, that ‘supply creates its own demand’, while Malthus asserted the possibility of over-saving (and over-investment) creating an excess supply.

Ricardo’s apparently watertight logic won acceptance for Say’s Law for over a century, until Keynes in 1933 drew attention to Malthus’s use of the principle of ‘effective demand’ and contended that ‘the whole problem of the balance between Saving and Investment had been posed’ in the Preface to his Principles of Political Economy in 1820. Economists tend to see Malthus’s Principles not so much as containing a notable foreshadowing of Keynes’s theory of employment as presenting, albeit through a glass darkly, a subtle and complex analysis of the conditions required to initiate and maintain balanced growth in a market economy.

R.D.Collison Black

Queen’s University Belfast

Keynes, J.M. (1933) Essays in Biography, London. Reprinted in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol X, (1972) London.

Malthus, T.R. (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd edn 1803, 6th edn 1826, London.

——(1820) The Principles of Political Economy, considered with a View to their Practical Application, 2nd edn 1836, London.

Sraffa, P. (ed.) (1951 2) Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol II, pp. 308, 312; Vol VIII, pp. 257, 285, 300–01; Vol IX, pp. 9–11; 15–17, 19 27.

James, P (1979) Population Malthus, His Life and Times, London.

Winch, D. (1987) Malthus, Oxford.

See also: demography.