Malthusianism

Malthusianism in contemporary usage refers generally to the problems of food and resource scarcity created by and the limits imposed on human population growth. It refers to the work of the English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus, particularly his Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. Although debates about the relative merits and demerits of Malthusian thought are now fairly sterile, they are nonetheless relevant to discussions of international development, population geography, food security, and migration. The following sums up the history, influence, and limitations of Malthusian thought.

Malthus's “principles” of population were, first, that human population grows geometrically (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 16 …) and, second, that its ability to feed itself grows only arithmetically (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4 …). Malthus allowed only two ways around this essential contradiction. With “preventive” checks, families, when faced with an inability to support their offspring adequately, should intentionally restrict their own fertility. For Malthus, however, such a victory of—as he saw it, “reason” over “nature”—was trumped by a “passion between the sexes,” which was particularly indomitable in the lower classes. With “positive” checks, however, the relative fixity of food supplies compared with population itself limited population growth in the form of famine, disease, and human misery. This latter check was regarded by Malthus as an inescapable law of nature leading to population “equilibrium” and is perhaps the essential core of what we call Malthusianism, even as it is used today.

Malthus penned his essay in the midst of the rapid population growth associated with industrialization and capitalization of agriculture in Britain, as well as the violent social upheavals in France and America. He aimed his canons at radical utopians such as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who believed that human reason and scientific advancement could transcend so-called natural laws and who consequently helped establish Britain's first welfare legislation. Malthus argued that social intervention in natural laws via social welfare would only temporarily stave off human misery, while encouraging population growth and lead to an even bigger calamity in the future. Consequently, he suggested, it was more humane in the long term to allow the poor to starve, though his critics cynically countered that this was a liberal construction meant to preserve the status quo, and hence his bourgeois lifestyle.

It is also notable that preventive checks for Malthus did not include birth control. Nevertheless, a number of 19th-century social reformers appropriated Malthus's ideas for decriminalizing birth control. These reformers were called neo-Malthusians; adding the prefix neo to Malthusianism in this early context (it has been used in different ways since) suggested a version of Malthusianism that accepted technological intervention in supposed natural laws, something Malthus himself would have repudiated as a threat to social order. Neo-Malthusianism retained all other basic tenets of Malthusianism. It had a wide range of political purposes depending on its various proponents, not the least of which were popular movements toward eugenics throughout Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Malthus's ideas, in some form or another, experienced something of a revival in the mid 20th century, particularly as they were incorporated into international policy discussions. The preeminent economist John Maynard Keynes, for example, trumpeted Malthus in his critiques of European reconstruction plans after World War I. Malthusian doctrine was also frequently deployed after World War II by certain critics of international food aid and the diffusion of Western agricultural practices. For example, Garrett Hardin's notorious “lifeboat ethics” argument of 1974 was largely an extrapolation of Malthus's argument against helping the poor on an international scale. The biologist Paul Ehrlich also notoriously revived Malthusian thinking and applied it to nonfood environmental resources, including clean air and water, timber, and mineral resources, in his 1968 book The Population Bomb (republished extensively afterward). At the end of the Cold War, literatures concerning relationships between population, resources, and violence, variably termed environmental security, resource wars, or green-war, also took a predominantly neo-Malthusian approach.

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