Malthusian population theory

Over a hundred and fifty years have gone by since the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, a clergyman of the Church of England and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, brought out the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population.

In that edition the Essay was mainly an exercise in what is now called 'debunking'. It was the outcome of much discussion between the author and his father on the Utopian visions of the Marquis Condorcet and William Godwin, who had recently written books proclaiming that humanity was on the way to establish an egalitarian state of society in which-war, disease, melancholy, and resentment having been abolished-every man would 'seek with ineffable ardour the good of all'. To the father these tidings made an irresistible appeal; but the son was unable to accept them as forecasts of reality. Ten years earlier he had emerged from the Cambridge mathematical schools as ninth Wrangler, and, as he put it, he had not 'acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wished without evidence'. He held that man's power to produce population is greater than his power to produce sub sistence, and that this disparity bars the way to the Utopias imagined by Condorcet and Godwin. For clearer statement, he put his argument into writing, elaborated it, and, on his father's advice decided to publish it. In 1798 it appeared, anonymously, as an octavo volume of 396 pages. So the famous Essay on the Principle of Population came into the world.