Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834)

Life and Writings

Thomas R. Malthus was born on February 13, 1766, in Surrey, southern England, as the sixth child of a prosperous family. His father, Daniel Malthus, is said to have known the philosophers David Hume, James Mill, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau personally. Little Thomas was educated by his father and private tutors; starting in 1784, Malthus attended Cambridge University's Jesus College, where he studied mathematics, classical languages, and literature. He obtained a master's degree in 1791 and became a fellow of Jesus College only two years later. In 1797 Malthus was ordained in the Anglican Church and decided to officiate as country clericalist in his home county.

In 1804, however, Malthus resigned from the priesthood to marry Harriet Eckersall, with whom he had three children. Soon after, in 1805, he became the first professor of political economy at the college of the East India Company at Haileybury, Hertfordshire. Already in 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers had been published anonymously. In this, Malthus's main work, which he revised continually until his death, he showed his deep economic and social pessimism, as he was convinced that any increase in productivity and wealth would inevitably be outrun by the evoked growth in the population's number. Consequently, he doubted the benefit of a high birth rate for an economy.

[Page 809]Around 1810 Malthus met one of the most important economists of the time, David Ricardo; an active correspondence and a close friendship developed. In 1819 Malthus obtained fellowship in the Royal Society; moreover he became a member of the Political Economy Club, and in 1834, he was one of the founders of the Statistical Society of London.

In his Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application (1820) Malthus wrote about the motivating parameters of individual economic decisions as individually rational cost/benefit considerations.

Population Theory

Following David Hume's empirically scientific attempt, Malthus generated his insights with respect to the constitution and the prospect of the society in a completely nonidealistic way, based solely on direct observation. He thereby formed one contradiction of significance to the French Revolution's idealists' and in parts even anarchists' (e.g., Rousseau, William Godwin, and M.-J.-A.-N. de Caritat marquis de Condorcet) theoretic idea of a perfect society.

Malthus did not believe in any kind of Utopia. He instead came to the conviction that a steady state of a society's economic prosperity would be utterly impossible due to an inevitably geometrical growth of population combined with at best an arithmetical growth of production of food. In consequence, at any time, the population will be too numerous to live in comfort. War, diseases, and famine are considered natural regulators and necessary to constrain the excessive growth of population and following misery. This bad fate Malthus deemed divine destiny to keep morality and to evade profane idleness. However, later in his life Malthus came to regard self-imposed moral restraint as an alternative check on population-food equilibrium.

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