In the second half of the eighteenth century, , David Hume, Adam Smith, , Richard Price, and Thomas Paine, predicted the destruction of England through national bankruptcy. Although Malthus also expressed anxieties about excessive growth, he changed the parameters by worrying about overpopulation rather than overspending.
In the late eighteenth century, philosophers began to advocate freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, and people expected that unstoppable progress would bring about social improvement.
Enlightenment optimism dispelled historical pessimism, finding its ultimate expression in the predictions of Nicolas de Calitat, the Marquis of Condorcet, and William Godwin, which were the real-life equivalents of Voltaire's fictional Dr. Pangloss.
Belief in progress was considered a feature of evolving political economy. After David Hume explicitly praised the beneficence of commercial modernity, Adam Smith promoted the idea of increasing open economic growth, Enlightenmentthe new, scientific, quantitative ethos of political economists helped to counter traditional moralism.
Political economist Thomas Robert Malthus was a lonely, isolated pessimist who had little connection to the widespread belief in the substantial improvements brought about by the Enlightenment.
mentioned in "Essays on the Principle of Population" in 11798 that the author believes that human progress in the future is severely limited: if not controlled, population will quickly exceed food supply, leading to poverty and famine.
Thus, a view emerged that Malthus broke completely with his predecessors and transformed political economy from an Enlightenment analysis of progress into a dismal science.
This broad view of the late eighteenth century raises questions about how we interpret and evaluate the Enlightenment. When supporters are forced to speak about our contemporary concerns, the meaning of what they did in their own time is distorted.
The case of Malthus is illustrative, and his theological arguments are often overlooked to show his enduring relevance as an economic thinker or "prophet of the anachronisms" of population growth tending to exceed limited resources.
In response to calls for a global approach to historical research, scholars have recently set out to find "new worlds" in papers and analyze "Malthus across nations."
Malthus wrote the first edition of his Treatise on the Principle of Population in 1798 to continue his disagreement with his father, Daniel Malthus, over the "future improvement of society." He is particularly concerned with Godwin's utopian vision of human perfection, Condorcet , it is less clear where the principle of population itself originated.
Some scholars thus emphasize the influence of Malthus's "real experience" of rural parish life, ongoing socioeconomic changes and the food shortages faced by Britain in the 1790s, while others look for traces of earlier studies of demography , statistics and socio-material improvements. The mathematical laws behind the
growth rate, often cited as the reason why Malthus's predictions seemed so convincing and dangerous, can be explained by his training at Cambridge University.
Malthus himself revealed that the information that first proposed the principle of population to him was written on impulse from the few materials that could be collected in Malthus's countryside.
In the debate between Robert Wallace and David Hume about the populousness of the ancient nations, Malthus sided with Wallace, who, as a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, calculated that far more people had lived on earth in ancient times. He explained the decline in population both in terms of natural causes and, more decisively, in moral ones.
Wallace claimed that even if restrictions on reproduction were removed under a perfect government, a tragic disaster must ensue because providence has limited the earth's ability to provide food.
However, Hume expressed doubts about the hypothesis of population decline, basing his speculations on observations of historical conditions due to insufficient population data, both ancient and present.
Hume observed that in ancient times, slavery, infanticide, frequent wars, violent politics, and limited commerce limited population growth, and that modern institutions, morals, and politics were more conducive to increasing the number of people on earth.
Richard Price's Observations on the Restitution Payments provided Malthus with some theoretical estimates that the population of the American colonies doubled every twenty-five years.
Although Adam Smith had little to say about population, his theory of progressive economic growth, wealth, and poverty was a major target of Malthus's essay.
The relationship between Malthus's ideas and those of his predecessors on population and poverty is well known, but another common concern that has been ignored so far is the fear of unlimited growth.
Revisionist Scholarship of the Age of Enlightenment shows that unequivocal celebrants of commerce like Hume and Smith expressed an ambivalence toward modernity, and while they praised the general increase in prosperity and decorum, the national debt caused them great concern.
These concerns were common among writers such as Arthur Young and the French Physiocrats: Liquid forms of property, new instruments of corruption, and the rise of pecuniary interests threatened established ideas about independent citizenship, balanced constitutions, and international competition for power.
Take the development of Britain as an example to illustrate how a country's ability to finance wars and maintain an empire through long-term loans threatens the future existence of a polity. Either the resulting social inequality will lead to revolution, or the overwhelming debt burden will make Britain unable to defend itself against foreign invaders.
To avoid the expected destruction of the country, politicians such as William Petty, the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, and philosophers such as Richard Price attempted to formulate and implement reforms.
As Richard Whatmore points out, their failed attempts to overcome the corrupt business system through science through legislators led to the end of the Enlightenment.
Based on the insights of the Enlightenment, Malthus's "Essays on the Principle of Population: A Pessimistic Forecast of Britain's Future" opens up a new context.
The first part of this book mainly explains Malthus's population principle and its consequences for the future of mankind, followed by an analysis of the national debt growth principle formulated by Malthus' sources.
Hume, Smith and Price worried that the runaway growth of outstanding financial liabilities would soon outstrip the sources of national revenue and concluded that disaster was a not-so-distant prospect.
For Malthus, those politicians and philosophers represented the group of capable and outspoken "advocates of human perfection" who had recently fueled political "speculation," but whose erroneous works were so dangerous that their rebuttal was crucial.
Godwin and Condorcet claimed that human beings are born free, equal and good , and they both blamed the current desolate state of men in society on the political and economic system.
Assuming that the world is constantly changing for the better, Godwin and Condorcet reasoned that repressive institutions will be dismantled , perfection will be gradually achieved, and men of the future will be immortal. They acknowledged that the resulting population growth would likely put pressure on existing means of survival, but Godwin and Condorcet explained that the problem was remote and easily solvable.
Malthus aimed to prove them wrong, admitting that he was willing to believe these visions of the future of mankind, but he came to the "disheartening" conclusion that the population principle made "any extraordinary progress in society" impossible.
Malthus set out to prove that Condorcet and Godwin arrived at their conclusions through non-philosophical speculation, relying on general and abstract propositions to make conjectures that "cannot be proven by any representation in the laws of nature."
In contrast, Malthus adopted the "Newtonian philosophical model" to analyze human prospects. He first studied the history and description of rude societies in the past and the experience of statistical information in civilized society today. The evidence collected allowed Malthus to deduce two laws determined by human nature: humans need food and passion for the opposite sex to survive.
Starting from this premise, Malthus derived his famous principle: "Population, if not controlled, increases in geometric proportions, survival only in arithmetical ratios, and since the laws of nature and their causal relationships are immutable, they can be used to calculate future probabilities.
Humanity's Fertility exceeds the ability of the earth to produce food, suffering is an "absolutely necessary consequence" due to differential progress and vice is a "very probable consequence"
To show that this prospect is not distant but "imminent", Malthus compared the geometric increase in population to the arithmetical increase in food. Long compared and concluded that in twenty-five years the ratio would be 512 to 10.
The increase in population increases food prices and lowers wages, making the lower classes of society miserable and vicious. Low labor prices will encourage land cultivators to hire more labor and improve the soil, thus bringing more food and happiness.
However, once the worker is in a comfortable position, he will start a family, population will begin to increase again, and the population principle destroys any hope of human perfection, as Malthus clearly stated: "I see no way for man to escape from the weight of this law that pervades all living nature.
No illusion of equality, no maximum regulation of the land, can remove its pressure, not even a century.
Rather than ruthless progress, a permanent oscillation between misery and happiness was to be expected, and Malthus claimed that no form of society could stop it. Britain's narrow tax-based relief system, established by bad laws, worsened the conditions of even the lower classes of society.
The only real means of achieving as much improvement as possible within the limits set by God was to increase the means of subsistence, either by cultivating new land or by increasing the fertility of currently cultivated soil, so that the condition of the poor would be improved to some extent, but Malthus insisted that preventing a recurrence of suffering required more than human power.
In order to reconcile the inevitable suffering in the world with the belief in an omnipotent and merciful God, Malthus stated that the principle of population brings more good than evil, and that the necessity of hard work for survival stimulates the naturally dull human being and leads it to moral excellence and increased knowledge.
Malthus expressed a more optimistic attitude in 1803 An extensive survey of past and present societies in Europe and overseas confirmed the basic assumption of the first edition: that the principle of population arises from immutable "laws of nature, that is, the laws of God" and operates in "every state in which man is found".
Malthus's view was that he found that a benevolent God provided man with the means to avoid the suffering caused by overpopulation, that unlike other organisms, man had reason and the ability to evaluate the consequences of his actions, and that it was his duty to exercise "moral restraint" and to regulate his passions by waiting for marriage until he could support his family through his trade.
Permanent improvements could only be achieved through the prudent habits of the poor, and in order to develop the necessary "spirit of independence, pride of decency, and taste for cleanliness and comfort," Malthus proposed a national education system in England.
Malthus insisted that while not all members of the lower classes would be promoted to the middle levels of society, some "partial benefits" would follow and the "total happiness of society" would be increased.
Malthus believed that the main obstacle to convincing members of the lower classes that only they could alleviate their hardships was existing poverty laws. Because they gave the lower classes a false idea of their ability to raise children, they encouraged population growth, lowered the price of labor, and raised the price of food.
To convey a sense of urgency, Malthus made a startling comparison: "The first great obstacle that arises in this country is the poor legal system, which is justly said to be evil, compared with which the national debt, with its so terrible extent, is trivial".
