What influenced Thomas Malthus?
Thomas Robert Malthus (February 13, 1766 – December 29, 1834) was a demographer and political economist, best known for his highly influential views on population growth. Malthus is widely regarded as the founder of modern demography. He made the prediction that population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person and so to widespread famine. He thus advocated sexual abstinence and late marriages as methods of controlling the population growth.
Malthus' views were developed largely in reaction to the optimistic views of his father and his associates, who was notably influenced by Rousseau; his work was also in response to the views of theMarquis de Condorcet.His famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population was specifically an attack on William Godwin's optimistic views on the "perfectibility of society." In essence, Malthus was an economic pessimist.
Malthus is widely regarded as the founder of modern demography. Malthus had proposed his Principle of Population as a universal natural law for all species, not just human beings. However, today, his theory is widely regarded as only an approximate natural law of population dynamics for all species. This is because it can be proven that nothing can sustain exponential growth at a constant rate indefinitely.
ronically, given Malthus' own opposition to contraception, his work was a strong influence on Francis Place , whose Neo-Malthusian movement was the first to advocate contraception.
Malthus’s thought reflects a reaction, amiably conducted, to his father’s views and to the doctrines of the French revolution and its supporters, such as the English radical philosopher William Godwin. Widely read for such works as Political Justice (1793), Godwin took for granted the perfectibility of humankind and looked to a millennium in which rational people would live prosperously and harmoniously without laws and institutions. Unlike Godwin (or, earlier, Rousseau), who viewed human affairs from a theoretical standpoint, Malthus was essentially an empiricist and took as his starting point the harsh realities of his time. His reaction developed in the tradition of British economics, which would today be considered sociological.
Malthus was an economic pessimist, viewing poverty as humanity’s inescapable lot. The argument in the first edition of his work on population is essentially abstract and analytic. After further reading and travels in Europe, Malthus produced a subsequent edition (1803), expanding the long pamphlet of 1798 into a longer book and adding much factual material and illustration to his thesis. At no point, even up to the final and massive sixth edition of 1826, did he ever adequately set out his premises or examine their logical status. Nor did he handle his factual and statistical materials with much critical or statistical rigour, even though statisticians in Europe and Great Britain had developed increasingly sophisticated techniques during Malthus’s lifetime. The 20th-century American sociologist and demographer Kingsley Davis remarked that, while Malthus’s theories were based on a strong empirical foundation, they tended to be weakest in their empiricism and strongest in their theoretical formulation. For better or worse, the
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