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Malthus reassessed
Journal of Historical Geography, 8,2 (1982) 189-192
Review article
Malthus reassessed E. A. Wrigley PATRICIA
His Life and Times (London: Routledge and g17.50) PETERSEN, Malthus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Heinemann, 1979. Pp. vit302. $17.50 and Ella50) JAMES, Population
Malthus:
Kegan Paul, 1979. Pp. xvf524. WILLIAM
London:
The degree of interest taken in Robert Malthus has varied greatly since An Essay on the was published in 1798. His standing has fluctuated no less. But the two movements have not necessarily moved in harmony. There were times when his name was often mentioned but his opinions (or alleged opinions) were widely execrated. At other times his work was largely neglected though his views were not so strongly disparaged. As a result his work remains widely misunderstood. We still lack an authoritative critical edition of the Essay (taking account of the six editions to appear during Malthus’s lifetime and especially of the major changes between the first and second editions of 1798 and 1803), or of the corpus of his writings as a whole. And there have been remarkably few assessments of his thought and intellectual significance which were at all commensurate with his stature. In part this has been due to the highly controversial inferences drawn from his arguments by both progressives and conservatives which have not made for detachment. In part the range of his influence has been an obstacle to an adequate assessment, for in addition to being the most important figure in the history of population studies, he was also an economist of the first rank, and is perhaps the only social scientist to have played a crucial role in the development of a major natural science. Darwin acknowledged the debt which he owed to Malthus in providing him an engine with which to drive the machinery of natural selection. The revival of interest in Malthus in the last few years was symbolized by the international conference held in Paris in 1980 and attended by several hundred scholars which was devoted to a reassessment of many aspects of his life and thought.[rl At much the same time two books were published which exemplify the new seriousness of interest in Malthus and add substantially to our knowledge of him both as a man and as a scholar. The authors, Patricia James and William Petersen, had different aims in mind, and brought to their tasks very different skills, so that their books complement rather than rival each other, and jointly represent a substantial step towards a fuller understanding of Malthus. It is a truism that every man is a child of his times, but it is a truism frequently disregarded in later writings about Malthus’s work. The industrial revolution created a world in which it has proved possible for well over a century to secure an average rate of growth in gross national product in the range 2-5 % per annum, varying considerably from country to country but always far in excess of the comparable growth rate in a Principle ofPopulation
030%7488/82/020189 + 04 $03.00/O
189
o 1982 Academic PressInc. (London) Ltd.
REVIEW ARTICLE
pre-industrial economy which might typically lie rather in the range O-O.5 % per annum. Whereas in traditional societies population growth was often capable of outstripping economic growth, the industrial revolution for the first time created a situation in which men could eat their cake and have it, so to speak. Rising numbers no longer posed a threat to living standards. Since Malthus addressed himself to the elucidation of the tension existing between powers of production and reproduction, and yet lived through the early stages of changes which were to make the issue appear remote, it is not surprising that some later writers regarded him as mistaken. The principal problems of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not those which had seemed to Malthus so pressing and so inevitable. By an irony of intellectual history Malthus provided a masterly analysis of the constraints with which any pre-industrial society must come to terms just at the time when the course of economic change in England was about to render his analysis obsolete. No man, however, can properly be blamed for failure to forecast the future when his intention is primarily to draw upon the experience of the past and interpret it both for its own sake, and to throw light on problems of his time. Petersen’s book is primarily intended to make Malthus’s ideas readily accessible and intelligible, and vigorously to counter the most prevalent misrepresentations of his ideas. The opening sentence of chapter 4 conveys his intention very clearly. “If we adopt the cynical definition of a classic, a work that everyone cites and no one reads, then the Essay on Population must be designated a superclassic-written by a man whose name has entered all the Western languages (with several false meanings, as I have remarked) but whose central ideas are often not accurately known even by professional demographers”. Petersen himself is no mean controversialist and deals peremptorily with many of the criticisms made of Malthus by his contemporaries and later writers. He is especially severe on Marx whom he observes to have rejected Malthus “in language exceptionally vituperative even by the permissive standards of socialist polemics” (pp. 74-5). At times perhaps Petersen’s vehemence may have the opposite effect to that which he intended, but in general his exposition of Malthus’s ideas and defence of their merits carries conviction. At times, too, Petersen’s method of exposition, which often takes the form of recounting the arguments advanced by Malthus and against him, rather than attempting a general and coherent exposition of his views, may make for difficulties. It helps to sustain interest but unless the reader is in&pendentZy familiar with Malthus’s works it will not be easy for him to judge Petersen’s accuracy. His prose, however, is often admirable, clear, succinct and free from unnecessary jargon. He is consistently effective in exposing the extent to which Malthus’s ideas have been misrepresented and also in conveying a feature of Malthus’s thought which is of great importance to understanding his writing-that the shadings and ambiguities in his reflections are not to be regarded as evidence of a weak or inconsistent mind but as a tribute to the complexity and intricacy of the topics he discussed, and to his honesty of purpose. Petersen sets out to cover a very extensive canvas. He examines Malthus’s intellectual inheritance from earlier thinkers, and especially his debt to Adam Smith; his controversies with his contemporaries such as Ricardo; and his influence upon subsequent generations, notably his exposition of the causes of a lack of effective demand and its similarity to Keynes’s discussion of the same point. The historical setting receives attention no less than intellectual links with individual scholars. This is perhaps the least successful aspect of Petersen’s enterprise, for his grasp of history seems to reflect only a selective reading of available literature. For example the thumbnail sketch of English agriculture before and after the enclosure acts in the later eighteenth century is an inadequate caricature. Similarly, chapter 9, entitled ‘Fertility’, is weakened by Petersen’s lack of acquaintance with much recent work in historical demography. To remark, for example, in connection with the fertility characteristics of the English population in Malthus’s day that “the practice of such a contraceptive means as coitus interruptus may have ranged, for all we know or can ever find out, from nil to the entire population”
REVIEW
ARTICLE
191
(pp. 184-5), is to betray a regrettable ignorance of the achievements of Louis Henry and of the opportunities afforded by the better parish registers. A very large part of the chapter is taken up with the subsequent history of the dissemination of knowledge and practice of birth control, with very little attention to Malthus’s own discussion of the circumstances in which the preventive check might outweigh the positive check in importance. In general Petersen’s strength lies in his success in capturing what might be termed the flavour of Malthus as a thinker, the hesitant synthesizer, able to penetrate but reluctant to compress reality, at home with symbolic and mathematical representations of social process but alive to their inadequacy. But the book remains a sketch for all the wide reading evinced in it, lacking both the coherence of an extended essay and the weight of an authoritative study; an excellent introduction but not a definitive discussion. Patricia James’s objectives were quite different from those of Petersen. Hers is a remarkable labour of love, adding enormously to the rather meagre stock of prior knowledge about Malthus’s personal life and public career. She has made herself familiar with every type of record which might serve to throw light on these topics and has been most scrupulous in listing her authority for each scrap of information. As a result we are now far better informed about one of the most distinguished and influential of all social scientists. Population Malthus is a biography in the conventional form, largely chronological in its organization, although occasionally, as with the chapter on the Principles, Mrs James abandons this format when it appears inappropriate for her purpose. She permits herself a good deal of licence in trying to recapture aspects of Malthus’s life not discoverable directly from her documentary sources. She is fond of Jane Austen, for example, and uses her insights into the sentiments of the day to provide a clue to Malthus’s early love life (p. 67). Or again, she speculates about the sights of London which may have attracted Malthus’s attention, or have been avoided by him (p. 80), and is apt to assume enthusiasms or dislikes on his part about which there can at best only be speculation as when she writes of Craigcrook that Malthus “must have loved the place, half castle and half country house, with rooms small enough for warmth and social intimacy” (pp. 409-10). At times such liberties may jar, but they are heavily outweighed by a great mass of well-documented detail drawn from correspondence, diaries, the India Office records or the published writings of Malthus’s contemporaries. Mrs James has read Malthus with keen intelligence and has clearly sought to refine her interpretation of Malthus’s economic and demographic ideas by discussion with specialists. Sometimes she provides valuable clarification of points easily misunderstood in the main texts; for example, the elaboration of his distinction between preventive and positive checks published as a note in the Monthly Review (p. 124). But herforte does not lie in the more academic issues arising out of Malthus’s work. It lies rather in enabling us to understand much more completely the circumstances in which he came to write, the personal and social pressures which distracted or encouraged him, the web of informal exchanges which linked together men of letters and science in Regency England, and the personality of Malthus himself. He emerges from Mrs James’s pages not simply as one of the subtlest and best balanced of social scientists but as a man of great humanity and warmth of spirit, seldom failing in generosity even with those who signally failed to do justice to his ideas and who became intemperate in their language when discussing his alleged views. He held liberal views on matters such as the granting of rights to Irish Catholics or the education of the poor, and was much grieved that his writings were so frequently traduced in caricature. Mrs James quotes in full a note written at the very end of his life to a girl whose identity is unknown but who had defended Malthus. The note reveals his unhappiness at the image imposed upon him by his critics. He writes that he is sure that she will “not only vindicate me against the accusation of massacring children, but say that I have specifically proposed as the best criterion of the happiness and good government of a country the number of
192
REVIEW ARTICLE
children born who arrive at the age of puberty. It is astonishing how many express a horror of my book who have never read it” (p. 458). William Petersen and Patricia James have dispersed much of the fog of misinformation and misinterpretation which has shrouded Malthus’s life and thought for too long. It will no longer be possible to repeat inaccurate information about the basic facts of his life (such as the size of his family), and will be more difficult than in the past to misrepresent his character and opinions. But neither book individually, nor the two in combination, can be taken as definitive in the sense of leaving little room for further work. On the contrary their greatest joint contribution may well be to stimulate further investigation of several aspects of Malthus’s work. The grounds for a balanced judgement of his achievements depend in part on making further progress in unravelling the nature of the relationships with which Malthus concerned himself. Knowing more about the economic, social and demographic history of England and other European countries will be very helpful in this regard. It is a very longstanding problem which afflicted Malthus himself as well as those who have studied his work. He was, for example, ignorant even of such an elementary fact as the size of the population of the country at the time of the First Essay, and elaborated his views on the relative importance of the positive and preventive checks with only the crudest of empirical data to aid hirn.lzI Comparable problems have lasted a very long time. They continued to handicap Petersen in his chapters on fertility and mortality. He took McKeown’s view as authoritative for the mortality history of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but confessed to finding no such guide to help him over the fertility history of the same period. Since he wrote data have finally become available sufficiently accurate to enable both the relative importance of fertility and mortality changes in altering growth rates to be assessed, and to enable their relationship to economic circumstances to be more fully examined.t31 Petersen is able only to fence with the question of Malthus’s assessment of the significance of the “European” marriage pattern, or the degree to which the restraints upon fertility associated with late marriage were breaking down in Malthus’s day. Now these and related matters such as the rise in the illegitimacy ratio can be described with much greater confidence, and Malthus’s success as an analyst of his own times can thus be reassessed. Similarly, his views on the nature and causes of secular fluctuations in population processes can be examined with a new insight. Malthus was a protean figure whose capacity to inspire a deeper understanding in others of many aspects of social and economic change is far from exhausted. There is good cause to be grateful, then, that these two new books substantially increase the likelihood that others will also immerse themselves in the writings of one of the most important of all those who have set themselves to understand the nature of pre-industrial society. London School of Economics and SSRC Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
Notes [l] Philip E. Ogden, Malthus yesterday and today Journal of Historical Geography 7 (1981) 91-3 [2] He supposed in 1798 that the population of Britain was “about seven millions”. Three years later the first census showed the true total to be 10.9 millions, or 56% bigger than he had imagined [3] E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England 1.541-1871. A reconstruction (London 1981)
Review article
Malthus reassessed E. A. Wrigley PATRICIA
His Life and Times (London: Routledge and g17.50) PETERSEN, Malthus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Heinemann, 1979. Pp. vit302. $17.50 and Ella50) JAMES, Population
Malthus:
Kegan Paul, 1979. Pp. xvf524. WILLIAM
London:
The degree of interest taken in Robert Malthus has varied greatly since An Essay on the was published in 1798. His standing has fluctuated no less. But the two movements have not necessarily moved in harmony. There were times when his name was often mentioned but his opinions (or alleged opinions) were widely execrated. At other times his work was largely neglected though his views were not so strongly disparaged. As a result his work remains widely misunderstood. We still lack an authoritative critical edition of the Essay (taking account of the six editions to appear during Malthus’s lifetime and especially of the major changes between the first and second editions of 1798 and 1803), or of the corpus of his writings as a whole. And there have been remarkably few assessments of his thought and intellectual significance which were at all commensurate with his stature. In part this has been due to the highly controversial inferences drawn from his arguments by both progressives and conservatives which have not made for detachment. In part the range of his influence has been an obstacle to an adequate assessment, for in addition to being the most important figure in the history of population studies, he was also an economist of the first rank, and is perhaps the only social scientist to have played a crucial role in the development of a major natural science. Darwin acknowledged the debt which he owed to Malthus in providing him an engine with which to drive the machinery of natural selection. The revival of interest in Malthus in the last few years was symbolized by the international conference held in Paris in 1980 and attended by several hundred scholars which was devoted to a reassessment of many aspects of his life and thought.[rl At much the same time two books were published which exemplify the new seriousness of interest in Malthus and add substantially to our knowledge of him both as a man and as a scholar. The authors, Patricia James and William Petersen, had different aims in mind, and brought to their tasks very different skills, so that their books complement rather than rival each other, and jointly represent a substantial step towards a fuller understanding of Malthus. It is a truism that every man is a child of his times, but it is a truism frequently disregarded in later writings about Malthus’s work. The industrial revolution created a world in which it has proved possible for well over a century to secure an average rate of growth in gross national product in the range 2-5 % per annum, varying considerably from country to country but always far in excess of the comparable growth rate in a Principle ofPopulation
030%7488/82/020189 + 04 $03.00/O
189
o 1982 Academic PressInc. (London) Ltd.
REVIEW ARTICLE
pre-industrial economy which might typically lie rather in the range O-O.5 % per annum. Whereas in traditional societies population growth was often capable of outstripping economic growth, the industrial revolution for the first time created a situation in which men could eat their cake and have it, so to speak. Rising numbers no longer posed a threat to living standards. Since Malthus addressed himself to the elucidation of the tension existing between powers of production and reproduction, and yet lived through the early stages of changes which were to make the issue appear remote, it is not surprising that some later writers regarded him as mistaken. The principal problems of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not those which had seemed to Malthus so pressing and so inevitable. By an irony of intellectual history Malthus provided a masterly analysis of the constraints with which any pre-industrial society must come to terms just at the time when the course of economic change in England was about to render his analysis obsolete. No man, however, can properly be blamed for failure to forecast the future when his intention is primarily to draw upon the experience of the past and interpret it both for its own sake, and to throw light on problems of his time. Petersen’s book is primarily intended to make Malthus’s ideas readily accessible and intelligible, and vigorously to counter the most prevalent misrepresentations of his ideas. The opening sentence of chapter 4 conveys his intention very clearly. “If we adopt the cynical definition of a classic, a work that everyone cites and no one reads, then the Essay on Population must be designated a superclassic-written by a man whose name has entered all the Western languages (with several false meanings, as I have remarked) but whose central ideas are often not accurately known even by professional demographers”. Petersen himself is no mean controversialist and deals peremptorily with many of the criticisms made of Malthus by his contemporaries and later writers. He is especially severe on Marx whom he observes to have rejected Malthus “in language exceptionally vituperative even by the permissive standards of socialist polemics” (pp. 74-5). At times perhaps Petersen’s vehemence may have the opposite effect to that which he intended, but in general his exposition of Malthus’s ideas and defence of their merits carries conviction. At times, too, Petersen’s method of exposition, which often takes the form of recounting the arguments advanced by Malthus and against him, rather than attempting a general and coherent exposition of his views, may make for difficulties. It helps to sustain interest but unless the reader is in&pendentZy familiar with Malthus’s works it will not be easy for him to judge Petersen’s accuracy. His prose, however, is often admirable, clear, succinct and free from unnecessary jargon. He is consistently effective in exposing the extent to which Malthus’s ideas have been misrepresented and also in conveying a feature of Malthus’s thought which is of great importance to understanding his writing-that the shadings and ambiguities in his reflections are not to be regarded as evidence of a weak or inconsistent mind but as a tribute to the complexity and intricacy of the topics he discussed, and to his honesty of purpose. Petersen sets out to cover a very extensive canvas. He examines Malthus’s intellectual inheritance from earlier thinkers, and especially his debt to Adam Smith; his controversies with his contemporaries such as Ricardo; and his influence upon subsequent generations, notably his exposition of the causes of a lack of effective demand and its similarity to Keynes’s discussion of the same point. The historical setting receives attention no less than intellectual links with individual scholars. This is perhaps the least successful aspect of Petersen’s enterprise, for his grasp of history seems to reflect only a selective reading of available literature. For example the thumbnail sketch of English agriculture before and after the enclosure acts in the later eighteenth century is an inadequate caricature. Similarly, chapter 9, entitled ‘Fertility’, is weakened by Petersen’s lack of acquaintance with much recent work in historical demography. To remark, for example, in connection with the fertility characteristics of the English population in Malthus’s day that “the practice of such a contraceptive means as coitus interruptus may have ranged, for all we know or can ever find out, from nil to the entire population”
REVIEW
ARTICLE
191
(pp. 184-5), is to betray a regrettable ignorance of the achievements of Louis Henry and of the opportunities afforded by the better parish registers. A very large part of the chapter is taken up with the subsequent history of the dissemination of knowledge and practice of birth control, with very little attention to Malthus’s own discussion of the circumstances in which the preventive check might outweigh the positive check in importance. In general Petersen’s strength lies in his success in capturing what might be termed the flavour of Malthus as a thinker, the hesitant synthesizer, able to penetrate but reluctant to compress reality, at home with symbolic and mathematical representations of social process but alive to their inadequacy. But the book remains a sketch for all the wide reading evinced in it, lacking both the coherence of an extended essay and the weight of an authoritative study; an excellent introduction but not a definitive discussion. Patricia James’s objectives were quite different from those of Petersen. Hers is a remarkable labour of love, adding enormously to the rather meagre stock of prior knowledge about Malthus’s personal life and public career. She has made herself familiar with every type of record which might serve to throw light on these topics and has been most scrupulous in listing her authority for each scrap of information. As a result we are now far better informed about one of the most distinguished and influential of all social scientists. Population Malthus is a biography in the conventional form, largely chronological in its organization, although occasionally, as with the chapter on the Principles, Mrs James abandons this format when it appears inappropriate for her purpose. She permits herself a good deal of licence in trying to recapture aspects of Malthus’s life not discoverable directly from her documentary sources. She is fond of Jane Austen, for example, and uses her insights into the sentiments of the day to provide a clue to Malthus’s early love life (p. 67). Or again, she speculates about the sights of London which may have attracted Malthus’s attention, or have been avoided by him (p. 80), and is apt to assume enthusiasms or dislikes on his part about which there can at best only be speculation as when she writes of Craigcrook that Malthus “must have loved the place, half castle and half country house, with rooms small enough for warmth and social intimacy” (pp. 409-10). At times such liberties may jar, but they are heavily outweighed by a great mass of well-documented detail drawn from correspondence, diaries, the India Office records or the published writings of Malthus’s contemporaries. Mrs James has read Malthus with keen intelligence and has clearly sought to refine her interpretation of Malthus’s economic and demographic ideas by discussion with specialists. Sometimes she provides valuable clarification of points easily misunderstood in the main texts; for example, the elaboration of his distinction between preventive and positive checks published as a note in the Monthly Review (p. 124). But herforte does not lie in the more academic issues arising out of Malthus’s work. It lies rather in enabling us to understand much more completely the circumstances in which he came to write, the personal and social pressures which distracted or encouraged him, the web of informal exchanges which linked together men of letters and science in Regency England, and the personality of Malthus himself. He emerges from Mrs James’s pages not simply as one of the subtlest and best balanced of social scientists but as a man of great humanity and warmth of spirit, seldom failing in generosity even with those who signally failed to do justice to his ideas and who became intemperate in their language when discussing his alleged views. He held liberal views on matters such as the granting of rights to Irish Catholics or the education of the poor, and was much grieved that his writings were so frequently traduced in caricature. Mrs James quotes in full a note written at the very end of his life to a girl whose identity is unknown but who had defended Malthus. The note reveals his unhappiness at the image imposed upon him by his critics. He writes that he is sure that she will “not only vindicate me against the accusation of massacring children, but say that I have specifically proposed as the best criterion of the happiness and good government of a country the number of
192
REVIEW ARTICLE
children born who arrive at the age of puberty. It is astonishing how many express a horror of my book who have never read it” (p. 458). William Petersen and Patricia James have dispersed much of the fog of misinformation and misinterpretation which has shrouded Malthus’s life and thought for too long. It will no longer be possible to repeat inaccurate information about the basic facts of his life (such as the size of his family), and will be more difficult than in the past to misrepresent his character and opinions. But neither book individually, nor the two in combination, can be taken as definitive in the sense of leaving little room for further work. On the contrary their greatest joint contribution may well be to stimulate further investigation of several aspects of Malthus’s work. The grounds for a balanced judgement of his achievements depend in part on making further progress in unravelling the nature of the relationships with which Malthus concerned himself. Knowing more about the economic, social and demographic history of England and other European countries will be very helpful in this regard. It is a very longstanding problem which afflicted Malthus himself as well as those who have studied his work. He was, for example, ignorant even of such an elementary fact as the size of the population of the country at the time of the First Essay, and elaborated his views on the relative importance of the positive and preventive checks with only the crudest of empirical data to aid hirn.lzI Comparable problems have lasted a very long time. They continued to handicap Petersen in his chapters on fertility and mortality. He took McKeown’s view as authoritative for the mortality history of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but confessed to finding no such guide to help him over the fertility history of the same period. Since he wrote data have finally become available sufficiently accurate to enable both the relative importance of fertility and mortality changes in altering growth rates to be assessed, and to enable their relationship to economic circumstances to be more fully examined.t31 Petersen is able only to fence with the question of Malthus’s assessment of the significance of the “European” marriage pattern, or the degree to which the restraints upon fertility associated with late marriage were breaking down in Malthus’s day. Now these and related matters such as the rise in the illegitimacy ratio can be described with much greater confidence, and Malthus’s success as an analyst of his own times can thus be reassessed. Similarly, his views on the nature and causes of secular fluctuations in population processes can be examined with a new insight. Malthus was a protean figure whose capacity to inspire a deeper understanding in others of many aspects of social and economic change is far from exhausted. There is good cause to be grateful, then, that these two new books substantially increase the likelihood that others will also immerse themselves in the writings of one of the most important of all those who have set themselves to understand the nature of pre-industrial society. London School of Economics and SSRC Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
Notes [l] Philip E. Ogden, Malthus yesterday and today Journal of Historical Geography 7 (1981) 91-3 [2] He supposed in 1798 that the population of Britain was “about seven millions”. Three years later the first census showed the true total to be 10.9 millions, or 56% bigger than he had imagined [3] E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England 1.541-1871. A reconstruction (London 1981)