Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet

by Robert J. Mayhew

Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.

Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.

Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

Genres: Economics, History, Biography

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2014

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more of an "intellectual context" book, before and after Malthus, than any kind of biography. It lays out Malthus' intellectual predecessors, the political context of their time, and moves forward through Malthus' own era rather quickly, focusing more on what his peers wrote about him than what he wrote himself. Then there's several chapters tracing Malthus' influence through the American eugenicists to Hitler and Paul Ehrlich. In that way, it provided useful background material for stuff that only came up vaguely in the intellectual bio of Ehrlich Sabin gave in The Bet.

So the coverage of Malthus--his personality, relationships, pastimes, and especially, his actual writings--is thinner than I would have liked, but still enough to completely overturn my impressions of him. Turns out he's closer to the gentleman scholar archetype of a Humboldt or Darwin, travelling around Europe and collecting scholarly (lol) reports on other continents, collating them into a broader theory, with a fairly nerdy goal (utilitarianism a la Jeremy Bentham). That is, he wasn't a classist who hated the poor, or a racist who hated non-whites, or a Christian (as Giorgis Kallis had painted him for me) who believed God wanted us to suffer population regulation to force us to be more virtuous. He just made what are in retrospect very trivial points about population ecology, said some questionable but well-intentioned things about British welfare policy (which was certainly not unimpeachable at the time), and passed on a bunch of openly racist descriptions of indigenous people. Most of the things people later said in his name--that the earth has a fixed population limit, that population growth always leads to famine, that more people was a bad thing, that certain races are incapable of restraining their breeding--were all things Malthus either openly disagreed with or at worst was agnostic on.

[JZY · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is rare to encounter an academic and biographical work as literary and expansive yet heavily contextualized and analytical as this work by Robert Mayhew. He weaves an Ariadnian web from the pre-Malthus times of Price, Condorcet,and Godwin, to Malthus and his writing, and to the endless rebuttals and defenses in the ages since, be they by readers or those convinced of the evil of Malthus.

3 quotes of the innumerable:
P. 177: "Malthus in decline is still most assuredly Malthus."

P. 231: "'Have we beaten Malthus? After two centuries, we still do not really know.' And it is for this reason that Malthus's future is assured. ... The question is more what kind of Malthus we want as we seek to address the problems global society now faces."

P.235: "If we want a "usable" Malthus as we address the Nexus of demographic and environmental change in our own age, perhaps it can be found here in the later Malthus [referring to the subsequent 1803 to 1826 versions of Essay]. Such a Malthus should be read rather than merely caricatured, and he should be read not through a "right-wrong" binary of timeless truth but for his temper of mind." In other words, where Malthus has normally been read in scriptural terms as right or wrong, he is better read as an "organon", a tool by which to reason."

Dr Mayhew has truly created a work for the ages.

[Supriyo Chaudhuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which I picked up expecting a biography of Malthus, is really a history of an idea, or a set of ideas, that Malthus' 1798 Essay spawned. Known in its naive form of geometric-arithmatic progression related imbalance, or its summary disposition that population would outstrip resources only to be checked by catastrophes, there is more to Malthus than one knows. At the end of this book, one appreciates how central he is to our current conversations, and as Prof Mayhew points out, how his ideas have been resurrected and somehow reformulated in the context of the challenges of each age. This, rightly, gives the Essay a canonical status, but a largely unread canon! I was drawn to some other ideas of Malthus outside the central arguments about population and resource - the idea of effective demand that I knew from Marx and Keynes and the idea of legitimate supply, that I did not and yet found it so very relevant - and this is one of the best takeaways from this book for me.

[Jim Manis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why Malthus is relevant (and perhaps should still be read).

If you're tuned into pop culture, you should be keenly aware of Malthus' relevance. Population, food management, global warming, threats of war, ongoing wars. (Think, "The Walking Dead" for instance. The list seems endless.)

Malthus himself failed to recognize the full gamut of human ingenuity, but then the religious right denies it completely.

Mayhew provides an excellent overview on why we should neither dismiss Malthus nor blindly accept his thesis. He does recommend that we actually read him and exam the thread of his concerns as it winds its way through the past two centuries.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Malthus is a scholarly and very rewarding book for the patient reader that charts Malthus's life and especially his intellectual legacy. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019...