In Our Time - Malthusianism

Episode Date: June 22, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Malthusianism.In the eighteenth century, as expanding agriculture and industry resulted in a rapid increase in the European population, a number of writers began to consider the implications of this rise in numbers. Some argued it was a positive development, since a larger population meant more workers and thus more wealth. Others maintained that it placed an intolerable strain on natural resources.In 1798 a young Anglican priest, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, published An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that the population was increasing exponentially, and that food production could not keep pace; eventually a crisis would ensue. He suggested that famine, disease and wars acted as a natural corrective to overpopulation, and also suggested a number of ways in which humans could regulate their own numbers. The work caused a furore and fuelled a public debate about the size and sustainability of the British population which raged for generations. It was a profoundly influential work: Charles Darwin credited Malthus with having inspired his Theory of Natural Selection.With:Karen O'BrienPro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of BirminghamMark PhilpLecturer in Politics at the University of OxfordEmma GriffinSenior Lecturer in History at the University of East Anglia Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the years after the French Revolution, an eccentric, intellectual and wealthy Surrey landowner, Daniel Malthus, enjoyed friendly debates with his son, Thomas,

a priest and Cambridge academic. Daniel was a passionate admirer of William Godwerewere. who believed in the possibility of a world of perfect human happiness and equality. Thomas retorted that the rapid increase in the human population meant that Godwin's vision was hopelessly optimistic. And he went to the lengths of writing a book to explain why. Thomas Malthus, an essay on the principal population was published in 1798 and attracted both admiration and horror.

Malthus argued that the size of the human population will always increase more quickly than our ability to feed ourselves. and he saw plague, famine and wars as natural mechanism designed to keep human numbers within manageable limits. The book had an immediate impact on politics and economics. Malthus ideas were cited by Charles Darwin as a key influence in his theory of natural selection, and they remain contentious today. With me to discuss Thomas Malthus and Malthusianism, I Karen O'Brien, pro-vice Chancellor for Education at the University of Birmingham,

Mark Phelp, lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford, and Emma Griffin, Senior Lecture in History at the University of East Angier. Emma Griffin, can you give us some idea of the background to this story? Why, in the latter part of the 18th century, did the size of the population start to provoke debate? There are all sorts of reasons why people are talking about population. I mean, on some level, people have always been interested in population, so there's always been some small discussion and debate about the pros and cons of a large or small population. And over the 18th century, the economy is growing.

We have the rise of political economy as well. So it's quite a lot of debate about all of these things that's kind of there in the background. But there are also some really good social and economic reasons, I think, why population is becoming a more and more pressing concern. And that's because the population is actually growing very rapidly all throughout the 18th century. So by the end of the 18th century, it's almost doubled in size,

which is, in historical terms, a very rapid growth of population indeed. And even more than that, you have certain parts of the country, Lancashire, for example, the population has doubled in Lancashire in just the last 40 years of the 18th century, so that's very rapid growth. And population is moving around and living in slightly different ways, and it's starting to become apparent, I think, or it's possible that people can see it's apparent that the population is different to the way it has been in the past. We have the growth of these great towns, for example. We used to have just London as a great big city, and then the smaller towns like Norwich and Bristol and Exeter, which only 10 or 20,000 in size. Now, by the end of the 18th century, we've got cities that have got 100,000 inhabitants. Manchester has increased 10 times over the course of the 18th century.

So for all sorts of reasons, I think there's enough going on. All these changes, of course, are triggered and connected with industrialisation, mechanisation, the growth of coal. So there's all sorts of changes in the economy and in the society that are giving enough pointers for interested people to look around and think that maybe there is something going on and there's something to think about and to consider. here. You spoke about the growth of political signs in the Enlightenment. There were broadly two sides, two groupings in this debate about population

McGriffin. Can you just briefly describe what those two sides were? Yes, absolutely. On the one hand, we have the mercantilists who, amongst other things, are very enthusiastic about having a large population. They think it's a good idea to have a large

population. You have, therefore, people who can work in your armies, people who can manufacture goods for you, who can work as your servants. You want a large population all living quite close to the breadline. You don't want them having high wages. A large population of people living on low wages, basically. They think that will lead to economic growth and a strong nation.

In response to that, though, there are also the physiocrats who believe actually it might be preferable to have a much smaller population, but each one living much more comfortably. And a very nice proponent of this idea is a political economist called Richard Cantillon. And he makes a very interesting comparison between Britain and France. He says in France, you've got a very large population, but they're all just living on onions, they're drinking water, they're eating bread, they've got hemp clothes, wooden clogs, very, very mean existence,

not a very good way to go at all. But look at Britain, by contrast, he says, look at England. You've got a much smaller population and look how they live. They sleep on beds, they have nice houses, they have leather shoes and woolen tights. They eat meat and butter and cheese and vegetables. they drink beer, how much preferable this is. So how much better it is, he argues, to have a small population living comfortably

than a large population living meanly. Karen O'Brien, Malthus' father was particularly influential on him and in this story. Can you tell us something of his family background? Yes, as you mentioned, Malthus came from a wealthy Surrey family and a large family, it's worth noting, I think, at the outset. And his father, Daniel, was clearly quite a remarkable man of very radical political views.

Daniel borderline worshipped the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau went to visit him in France, and when Rousseau came to England, went to visit him there. And one sense is that all through Malthus' upbringing, a major topic of discussion in the Malthus household was issues of progress and human perfectibility, those big debates of the Enlightenment. Is it possible for people to change their moral characters to human beings have the potential to grow morally? and can they transform society in the process? And very true to the sort of spirit of his principles, Daniel Malthus appears to have had progressive views about women.

It's said that he forbade his wife to wear a wedding ring, presumably because he thought that was a symbol of a certain kind of patriarchy. And despite the fact that they were an Anglican family, Daniel took the unusual step of sending his son to the Warrington Academy, which was an academy for non- Anglican dissenters, known for the very high quality of its education, but also known for a very progressive style of educational activity and for the radical political views of the tutors there.

So when Malthus was 16, he went off to Warrington and he spent two years working with Gilbert Wakefield, who subsequently was someone who was arrested for sedition, for criticising the government and the way that it pursued the war against France and who died as a result of being imprisoned. So Malthus's early formation was very much in, radical and progressive political circles, partly through his father. And then he went to Cambridge, and did Cambridge change him?

To a degree, but he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, which in those days was the centre of a more progressive and Republican thinking in the 18th century, and his tutor there, William Friend, who was also a friend of Coleridge's, was also subsequently kicked out of Cambridge again for his radical political views. So Malthus, even when he was at Cambridge, he stayed in this relatively progressive political bubble. He did take holy orders and after he left Cambridge he became a curate. So despite his education at Warrington he did sign up to the Anglican Church and become a vicar subsequently. And can you just give us some summary of the ideas that he might have come out of Cambridge?

It's always difficult to imagine. What would be in that young, it would be about 1790, wouldn't it? Something like that. And what would be in that young man's head? What would he have learnt that would take him forward? A number of things. There would have been, I'm sure, a very active debate about the consequences of the French Revolution and whether the path that France had taken in 1789 was one that Britain ought to take. There was a very active interest in Newtonian mathematics, and we see this in the formation of Malthus' economic thought, and I think probably he would have said that one of the main things he learned at Cambridge

was mathematics and how to think mathematically, not just about the physical sciences, but also about social problems. It's the application of mathematical knowledge to the social arena. And then thirdly, there was a particular kind of theological thinking that was prevalent in Cambridge at the time, which suggested that you could think about nature as in some way telling us about how God thinks about the sorts of laws that God wishes to imprint on the natural world, so that we can learn from the natural world what's God's true purpose is. And again, when we come to think about Malthus's views on population, we'll see a connection there between his religious thinking, his thinking about the natural world, the ecological world in which human beings live.

and economics. His move to be a vicar in the Church of England, was that what a gentleman did, one option opener? Was that because he believed in the, he had faith in the Anglican Church? I think it's partly what a gentleman did. I don't think his father would have insisted, but I think it's what he wanted,

and it gave him the opportunity to think and write. It wasn't excessively demanding, let's say. But also, I think there's no doubt that throughout his life, Malthus was a sincere believer. He had progressive views, in relation to the toleration of other people, Roman Catholic's descendants who did not share his Anglican outlook. But I think it was sat very comfortable with him as a person.

Mark Philp, a significant figure from Malthus in the 1790s, and a significant figure in the 1790s, full stop, was William Godwin, philosopher, anarchist, essayist, much applauded man. Can you give us some sense of what he argued and why that was so significant from Malthus? So Godwin was originally a dissenting minister and he resigned from the church in 1783 and went to work as a hack writer in London

he managed to persuade at the beginning of the 1790s his publisher to advance him enough money to allow him to live while he wrote what he thought would be a compendium of moral and political thought and he started this in the spirit of Montesquieu trying to show the impact of political institutions on the way in which people's morals and ideas were formed. As he wrote, he became more and more convinced

that political institutions had a negative impact and a negative effect on morality. And he developed two basic principles, or maybe three. First was the idea of private judgment. He thought that the individual's private judgment should be sacrosanct. Second was that he thought utility should be the measure of all actions. And the third was that he thought that if people developed their private judgment and acted on the basis of utility, there would be a process of the advancement of the human mind.

If that's the kind of core intellectual strategy of Godwin, in the second part of the book, he then shows why government can be dispensed with, why punishment can be dispensed with, why laws can be for the most part dispensed with. And in the final book, he addresses a number of issues. He says that property should be equalized, that labour should be equalized. He has a very powerful kind of section denouncing the imposition of marriage and saying that people should relate to each other entirely freely from the kind of laws of marriage. and he suggests that all forms of cooperation should be abandoned.

He's not very keen, for example, on concerts because that requires a lack of independence of mind on the part of the participants. And he eventually argues for the possibility of human perfectability, that is, the development of mind's capacity to control the body to the extent of being able to put off ageing, ultimately, to develop kind of human immortality. Now, it has to be emphasised that the last book is very speculative, and Godwin is clear in that book that what he's doing

is speculating on the basis of the principles advanced earlier in the book. And it's that last book that Malthus really focuses on. If you look at Malthus's copy of the 1796 edition of Political Justice, there are some notes in the first 30 or 40 pages, and then there's nothing until the last book and then there's very detailed notation in the last book. What impact did this have on Malthus? Godwin had an impact on a great number of people.

For his time and for a time, he was a considerable figure and then his marriage. We haven't time to go into that, unfortunately, not because it's salacious, but because it's fascinating. What impact did his ideas have on Malthus? You say lots of scribbling in Malthus copy of the... of the inquiry concerning political justice. So I think what Malthus provided was a target,

what Godwin provided for Malthus was a target. Malthus was very keen to make progress in his kind of career. He was stuck in a curacy that wasn't sufficient to allow him to have his own household. He lived at home and had to ride on horseback to deliver his sermons. He was not a natural clergyman in the sense that he had a cleft palate and a hair, lip and that made speaking in public problematic for him. And in many respects, he's a very ambitious man who's trying to make an impact. What Godwin provided him was a target.

He felt, I mean, it's a complicated situation because in many respects, Malthus presents himself as an impartial, objective, scientific observer. If we take that story and believe it at least for a moment, what he does is he does is, He says, look, these judgments of Malthus of Godwin about the elimination of property, the elimination of marriage, the development of perfectability, they can't be sustained. And his principles that he develops in the essay on population are effectively to show that they can't be sustained. Can we move to the book itself now, Amegraffin, in 1798 he published his essay on the principle of population. Do we know why he wrote it, first of all, and then if you could,

briefly summarise its main findings. Okay, there are a number of reasons why he ends up putting his ideas down to, his ideas down on paper. One of the things is, as Karen mentions, he's now working as a curate, and one of his jobs as a parish priest is to register all the births, all the births, well, it's not the births, the baptisms, the burials and the marriages. And one of the things he notices in this role is that he seems to be baptising a lot more very poor children than he is burying members of the first.

poor. He's also very shocked, as he starts working in this parish, he is very shocked by the poverty of the poor people in this parish. They're living on desperately inadequate diets, they've got inadequate clothing when shoes. They're homes, and miserable. They're living in terrible poverty, so that's a great shock. And he's also quite alarmed by the fact that he seems to be baptising more of them than he's burying. And therefore, as soon as there's a slight improvement in anybody's situation, the response is to have more children, that's bringing everybody back down, all these poor people bring them right back down to this miserable level of existence. again because they're all fighting over a finite set of resources.

So that's one of the things that sets him thinking about population. One other factor, again, thinking back to what Karen has been saying about his family and his background, he's still living with his parents and he's talking with his father all the time about his ideas and he starts to, you know, his father has these ideas, he's very kind of keen on the ideas of Godwin, he's debating that with Malthus. And there's this dialogue that's going on between them all the time and Malthus is saying, I don't see how we can move forward to this. this much more pleasant era, because every time you move forward, people have more children,

and therefore they're just in miserable poverty again. It's this kind of vicious cycle that people are in. Therefore, because he's debating all of these ideas within his family, his father's actually very impressed and very kind of taken with Malthus' ideas, and he's the one that encourages him to put that into print. So that's the kind of the immediate trigger, so the kind of long-term origins of these ideas, and there's an immediate trigger in the form of his father

that leads to Malthus actually publishing the pamphlets. But if you, I'd come, I want to go to Cohn in a moment to get into more detail, but just as a headline, if you were to summarise in a few sentences, I know it's a terrible thing to ask anybody, but if you were, what would you say it was the main point he was making, if you had to write the blurb for it? For his self-repletion. The blurb would be that population is always going to increase more rapidly than food supply. And that is the basic problem that Malthus thinks he has identified, and he has a number of solutions and observations about that population.

But the headline is population is going to increase more rapidly than the food supply is going to, and that is going to mean that very large numbers of the population are going to remain very, very poor. Karen O'Brien, can we go into a bit more detail there? How does he prove that? He identifies in the title and in the first edition of this book what he calls a principle of population. So it is Emma's vicious cycle, but he puts quite a mathematical spin on it. What he says is that population tends to increase at a geometric rate, which is to say that two people will have four children who have four more children and so on and so on,

so the population will grow in that kind of way, whereas food supply will only tend to increase at an arithmetic rate, in other words, a little bit more every year. So there's a logic of doom in all of this, which says that population will ultimately always outstrip food supply, but then what will happen to check population growth are one of the three things that you mentioned at the beginning. There could be a famine, there could be war, or there could be the kinds of diseases that result from the miserable conditions

that people are forced to live in. Why did he get these figures from? We're not entirely sure. Was he just trying to use signs as a bit of contemporary bafflement? I think he was. I mean, I think he read a lot of Newton at Cambridge, and I think there's an element of kind of smoke and mirrors or a bit of panash about the way that he puts these kinds of numbers on it because actually if you do the maths, if his predictions were true,

the population by the end of the 19th century would have been into hundreds of millions, and that simply wasn't the case. So these were not correct analyses, but it was a way of really trying to ram home to people that the fact that it did appear that death rates were falling, and he said things about the fact that particularly smallpox and other kinds of diseases were in decline, and that birth rates appear to be going up should be a really serious cause for alarm.

So what follows from the principle of population is a thoroughgoing revision of all of those ideas of Gobwin and Russo and of the Enlightenment, which says that it's really culture and politics that's responsible for human inequality and human misery. And what Malthus is saying is that the bottom line is that property, culture, inequality, political institutions, however unfair and unequal they may be, are not the cause and they're not really the remedy. There's an underlying ecology here which says that population will. will outstrip natural resources. And he hammers that home quite abrasively, doesn't it? He does in the first edition. In that first edition, yes. He softens the line in the very different second edition of 1803 of the essay,

where he adds a very large book in which he explores a possible solution to this problem, not the solution of famine, war and disease, but the solution of what he calls moral restraint. In other words, if people would only marry a bit later, have fewer children, then we might, by our own endeavour. be able to avert catastrophe. We'll try to get later to his very severe, and we would now think draconian views on the poor law

and whether people have two many children should have any right whatsoever to be supported by the state, but that'll be later. Can we just, Mark, we'll come back to you on Godwin. Godwin features in the, as one of the reasons why he wrote this book in the first place, and Godwin is the sort of the visible and invisible enemy in the book. It gets him going, as it were.

Which part of Godwin did he particularly attack in his book in the first edition, 1798? So he deals mainly with the last book of the eight book. The speculative book you talked about. Exactly. End of marriage. Yes. Yeah. And it's very much a case of Malthus taking things that Godwin himself was uncertain about,

wanted to advance relatively tentatively, and taking those as doctorate. that needed to be refuted. It's also pretty clear that Malthus had read Godwin's memoirs of the vindication of the Rights of Woman, his very heartfelt memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, which had been, was it a very shocking book for the 1790s because Godwin set out the way in which Wollstonecraft had had children outside marriage, that their own relationship had sort of developed.

to kind of sexual dimension before married. And Malthus is in many respects, I think, in the 1798 essay, appealing to his audience to recognize that Godwin is the person who everybody knows has had this very kind of odd relationship. So there's a kind of, he's aiming for maximum kind of publicity. Oh, so you think that it is, because the book about Mayor Wilsoncraft was, was Godwin's idea of doing honour to her by saying she was a very woman true to herself,

but she had unfortunate in one case, a hasty-headed relationship with men, children outside of marriages, two suicide attempts, and they themselves lived outside marriage, and they believed in agreement, and so she laid thinking, this is the modern woman, and people said, oh, no, she isn't,

or if she is, we're having nothing to do with, and said back her reputation for about 60 or 70 years, and that became part of the Godwin positioned, didn't it? His judgment was not good. So in that case, Malthus is not attacking him for his ideas so much as from the stink that came was made by, if I can use that word,

there was a stink in the papers and the journals, from his book about his late wife. So I think there's a dimension to it. One shouldn't over-emphasise it, partly because Malthus used the same publisher that Wollstonecraft had used and that Godwin used to publish his memoirs and the collected works of Wastoncraft.

Moreover, Mouthis then met Godwin, and they had a reasonably amicable set of exchanges. Their relationship didn't break down finally until the 1820s. But what the essay, if you read the essay in the context, it looks very much like another piece of anti-Jacoban literature that is sporting with the kinds of ideas that Godwin had, but also the kind of way in which he lived in.

his life and lived it with Wollstonecraft. So in that sense you're putting a political dimension on it. You're saying Malthus is part of what was becoming a very serious and intellectually respectable, conservative slam of opinion at that time, largely brought on by the wars with the revolutionary French, which wars were a great threat to this country. I would say that. I think it's important to recognise

that the conservative label has a small sea and there's a very wide spectrum, and there's huge differences of opinion amongst those. In many respects, Godwin and Malthus do have quite a lot in common. Yes, I will. That it's as a publicity, as a sort of an attempt to get an audience and to persuade that audience of his ideas, he's clearly playing a part in that kind of backlash.

I did try to inflict my voice so it was a lower-case C, as I said conservative. Emma Griffin, so how did Maltha suggest that the population crisis could be averted? Okay, the focus, since at the time, that Malthus wrote and since has often been on these what he calls the positive checks. So things like the famines, the war, the birth, the black death, these very dramatic moments in history He also thinks these are divine interventions, can be... He is a man of the cloth and he does see God

behind a lot of these events. But he sees... Can we just say that in a minute because it will be extraordinary to most of our listeners. So just it's worth staying in it. He says, in his book, Plague, Torrance These acts of God, as they were thought of in those days, are a good thing because they keep the popular... Is it as much as that? I see a shaking of a head on account.

It's a necessary thing and it's an inevitable thing. And I think this is what people... This is where attention is always focused. But what I would say is Malthus actually has another idea and that is not the positive check, which in fact, in England in the late 18th century, there aren't many positive checks. Those great big...

catastrophic demographic events that are wiping out large numbers have largely ebbed away by this point. And what he puts a lot of attention on, and though we subsequently have thought about much less, is what he called the preventative check. And the preventative check is the things that people can do themselves so as to make sure that the birth rate doesn't soar out of control. But being a clergyman, he can't advocate contraception.

No, no, he can't, and he doesn't. And most people aren't advocating that. It's very highly taboo at this time. but this is a society where almost all sex takes place within marriage. There are illegitimate births, but the illegitimacy rate is relatively low. Most people are creating new life within the context of marriage. So then all things being equal, a woman who marries at the age of 30, it's going to have a much smaller family than a woman who marries at the age of 19.

So he thinks that the best way, the most positive way of averting these crises, is simply to encourage the poor to marry, to delay marriage, until such time as they're able to look after their children themselves. So he has this rather hopeful view that the poor will delay marriage and therefore sexual satisfaction until their late 20s or beyond. He's not entirely stupid, he realizes this isn't going to come from nowhere. So he also believes that you want to be very mean with things like charity or with any kind of relief or aid or any kind of assistance that you might give to the poor

to help prop their marriages up. not be very mean because that's simply going to encourage them to carry on marrying younger. Before Mark comes in Northcombe, he didn't entirely say you'd deny sexual satisfaction because he did advocate the use of prostitutes, as his phrase would be the use of prostitutes. I wouldn't say he advocates any of this. He certainly, I mean, he doesn't really, he doesn't advocate that. He says that there are alternatives. And those alternatives, such as a controversial prostitution are very. Yeah. Just to say in the first edition, what I think most readers now would find very surprising about it

is that although there is a bit about how you can prevent these things by later marriage, he describes everything in terms of two basic principles, vice and misery. Vice involves things like abortion, about contraception, prostitution and so on, misery involves postponement. It's only really in the second edition that the postponement of marriage and the development of preventative checks of that form, are given the name of virtue.

So what's so shocking, I think, about the first essay is this sense that our alternatives, unlike Godwin's sort of advancement of mind, etc., our alternatives are vice or misery. Either you do stuff that you shouldn't be doing or you're going to have an unhappy life. You want to come in on that? And also the other alternative is the gradual abolition of the poor laws, the system of parish relief that props up people in times of,

bad harvest. And of course there have been any number of bad harvests in the mid-1790s and again in 1800. And what Maltha says is we can't do it straight away. That would be too mean. But ultimately it's a kind of welfare dependency issue. If you keep on giving handouts to the poor, they will just go on having more children. And also from a more kind of economist point of view, the poor law has the effect of artificially inflating food prices. This then artificially inflates wages and creates unemployment. So he thinks it is something of a kind of a humane argument because what he says is that the poor law creates the very poverty. It's designed to try and limit. Can you just explain to the listeners what the poor law is and how far it stretches?

The poor law dates back to the Elizabethan era and it's a system of entitlement to relief in terms of money and food that comes from the parish in which you were born. If you move outside that parish, you're not entitled to that relief. So it very much restricts people's mobility in the 18th century, but it was really straining to breaking point by the late 18th century and early 19th century because of the sheer numbers of people in need of assistance, so that up to about a seventh of the population in the early 19th century were on some kind of relief or other. What was the reaction to, and we'll come back to answer, what was the reaction to this book,

his book? The first edition people saw it as, as Margus described, as an argument with Godwin, although they were very shot by the unorthodox theology that you've mentioned. The second edition, we really get the beginning of a tide of anti-Malthusianism that will stay with the 19th century for the rest of this period. So by, you know, just a few years after the second edition of 1803, Malthus himself has become an ism in his own lifetime. A number of people are responsible for this,

but I think most prominent among those who attack Malthus are the romantics. So Robert Sothe, the poet, writes a very, very important review of the essay on the principle of population soon after it comes out in 1803, and Wordsworth and Coleridge join in the chorus. And the romantics essentially characterise Malthus as promulgating a worldview that is reductive, that's utilitarian, that's harsh and inhumane. And they redefine a new kind of organic social romanticism, a new kind of Tory paternalism ultimately against that particular. way of thinking that they think Malthus has. Can we develop this a little bit, Emma? He's saying that if you shouldn't have more children, then you can afford to bring up.

And if you can't afford to bring them, don't have them. And if you do have them, then the state has, you have no natural claim on the state, because it's your responsibility. And if they die, well, that's being cruel to be kind. That's almost, his ideas changed slightly because this essay population is rewritten or revised a number of times in the first third of the 19th century.

So it takes slightly different form at different times. But at its harshest, yes, he's saying, there's not space at nature's table for everybody. So we ought to allow some of these infants and babies to die away because they're never going to be very productive and they are just making things worse for all of the rest, all of the rest. And people are going to carry on with this kind of behaviour.

They're going to carry on marrying when they're far too young, they can't maintain a family if we give them this kind of support. So we do. We need to get rid of it. We'll keep it in place. for one year or for two years it will go. People will start to... It will be tough. He says it will be tough.

But this is what God wants anyway, and then things will start to get better. Of course, these very, very controversial views at the time, and that's part of the reason why there's a very strong reaction to what he's saying. But the argument is that this is a dependency which will debilitate where you should go for self-sufficiency, which would strengthen. Self-love, he calls it, absolutely. You want to encourage self-love,

and this is the way in which you will encourage self-love, absolutely. Yeah, no, so it is It's also His conception of virtue is fighting against precisely these kinds of challenges That you've The real kind of core of Malthus's thought Is that if you're going to achieve something in this world as an agent

It is by resisting The forces of vice, misery and so on So resisting the forces of vice means Let's keep this phrase current It's cruel to be kind. That is part of your resistance, and you have to steal yourself, just as presumably there's a stealing going on in the then thought to be heaven about sending down a plague, as it were.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the contrast with someone like Godwin is that Godwin wants to get rid of all forms of vice, wants to get, you know, thinks that there's a perfect ability that would allow us to do that. Malthus thinks without vice, actually the human existence is just not properly human. And I think another thing that's quite interesting to say

is that at the time that Malthus is writing, through most of history, he'd probably been right. It is the case that every time the economy improved, population increased, and then everybody was, standard of living was brought back down again, and the population had always worked within these cycles. So historically what he was saying was correct. But he's actually writing at the end of the 18th century, when the economy is richer than ever before, and when it is going to carry on becoming richer and richer

all through the 19th century, all into the 20th century, when his ideas actually cease to have more and more, cease to describe his society as more and more accurately. Karen, how did this feed into the argument of the time? It's a time of disputation, although it hasn't ever rarely been. How did it feed into the arguments going on at the time about how society should go in the first half of the 19th century? I think it had a very decisive shaping influence,

but I think one needs to put this alongside the fact that for the first time in British history, there was a census of the entire population in 1801 and has been, you know, every 10 years ever since. Did this book have any bearing on that coming about? It didn't directly. It was a very lively context of debate in the 1790s. But actually the architect of the census was the friend of the Romantics, John Rickman. He was a statistician and he persuaded an MP who was very concerned about food shortages

that if we took a census of the population, we might get a sense of how many people are actually working in agriculture and how many soldiers we might have to fight the war against the French. So it's part of the wider context. and obviously Malthus was very, very interested to see that the census returned for England and Wales returned a figure of about 10.9 million, which was even larger than he thought it was going to be.

So he felt vindicated in the sense of knowing that the population of England was, and Wales was indeed growing significantly. Again, talking about wider context of debate, I think Malthus's essays are part of the sound of the country coming to terms with the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. It's latent in a lot of what he says and how he positions the whole issue of food security

against the question of the manufacturing sector of the economy because he's aware that people are moving out of the countryside, they're moving into towns, they're having larger numbers of babies in towns, where does that leave the balance of the economy, what's the future of England going to look like? And he's not sure, as other economists at the time, were sure that the potential for growth lay in the manufacturing sector. And he was wrong about that.

Mark, to bring us back to the Godwin, Martha, dispute, Godwin sort of regrouped in the 1820s and attacked Malthus really Malthus in an anonymous review. I can't be not anonymous because everybody knows he did it attacked Godwin. So what's the argument there? Godwin actually had two goes. He had a go in 1801 in his reply to par, where he committed another faux par par and suggested in discussing the exposure of children

after birth, which then produced another outcry against Scotland. Godwin or Malta? Godwin produced this argument about the way in which earlier civilisations had exposed children. With approval, Spartan putting their children on the hillside. Exactly, exactly. And he was taken as saying, so we could do this, which of course didn't improve his reputation. He returned to Malthus in 1820. It's not clear why he became so obsessed with Malthus at this period, but it's clear that it was an obsession. there are letters that he writes to his wife while she's away saying,

you know, I think this is going to kill me, but I have to do it because I have to destroy the Malthus' kind of heresy. What was the heresy was really after? It's an obsession. What was it battening on, and why was he so obsessed by it? Well, so there are different dimensions. He's just wrong. Mouthin Godwin is just wrong about the size of population increase in America,

and he gets lots of advice about how to do the statistics, and it's clear that lots of people in this period aren't very good. good at that sort of stuff and Godwin makes some colossal errors of judgment but the real thing I think is that Godwin feels that Malthus he feels Malthus

responded to his own kind of concerns by picking up preventative restraints and treating those as possible virtues and then he feels that Malthus doesn't see that as soon as you admit that it's possible for individuals to constrain themselves

in terms of family size then the whole argument that Godwin had advanced becomes possible. And briefly, Emma Griffin, his ideas had an effect on the poor laws, the new poor laws drafting in the 1830s. I think that's right. We can certainly see that those ideas are filtering. There are lots of reasons why the poor laws are due, I mean, as Karen says, they date back to the 16th century.

So there's lots of reasons that they're based on the parish. We've got a much more complex and much more mobile society. So there are lots of reasons why they are ripe for reform. Costs have also been escalating. people are spending much more on their parish rates by the early 19th century than they had in the 18th century. So for all sorts of reasons, the debate is there, but one of the themes that is feeding into that

is Malthus and his ideas about the negative consequences of giving parish relief. Later on, Malthus died in 1834, but later on his ideas were taken up by Charles Darwin, who said these prompted my thinking along the way to writing great books. Did he do it write. Can you tell us a bit more about that, Mark? Well, I mean, I think there's a...

Darwin mentions having read Malthus. He's very impressed by the geometric, arithmetic distinction. And he thinks that Malthus's arguments about the way in which vice and misery-constrained kind of population growth have some impact on his own thinking about evolution. I think in detail, there's probably... it's inspiration rather than detailed influence. I would agree with that. I think Darwin took from Malthus that idea of the struggle for existence.

But for Malthus, the struggle is between people and the natural environment, whereas obviously with Darwin it's an intraspecies struggle. It's members of the same species struggling against each other. And Malthus was very concerned to actually mitigate that kind of struggle. But I think there's no doubt that Darwin made a kind of intellectual leap as a result of reading Malthus, but the rest was entirely his own doing. We're into the last part of the 19th century with Darwin. Are Malthus ideas still, are there still any traction there?

Absolutely. I think they've got a new spin, haven't they? With the ideas of evolution and the survival of the fittest in particular, Malthus's ideas come to life once more, and it seems that there's now possibly a kind of a genetic reason why Malthus was perhaps right that you ought to be leaving the infants of the poor to not survive. that it's not destined to happen biologically. And another more positive strand, neo-Malthusians from the early 19th century

going up through to John Stuart Mill who are accepting Darwin's conclusions but arguing for contraception as the right remedy for these problems and also for female education and female health. And does it peter out, marthusianism, or what would you say about that? I think it recurss periodically

because people panic about population growth. I think the core, of the mouthless debate in England for much of the 19th century is really not so much about population, it's about poverty and about how to deal with poverty. And that remains an abiding set of concerns. But the idea of population control has been addressed quite severely in the last century, in China, for instance, hasn't it? It has. And is that a sort of multifusianism, would you say? No, I don't think so. I mean, in many respects, what they're doing is simply, you know, showing that man can control the size of their own,

people can control the size of their own populations. No, it's a state solution, and what Malthus emphasises is the need for individual responsibility, in the Chinese case, I mean. What we see from Malthus, I think, is more than any other thinker. He starts to make population a topic for study. Prior to that, all the other thinkers, population is a footnote.

It's a short chapter in a long book. And what Malthus does is writes a whole essay, whole book about population. And in some ways, that's his most enduring legacy, that it becomes a topic, a subject that individuals and nation states are concerned with. Well, thank you very much. Emma Griffin, Karen O'Brien and Mark Phillip. Next week we'll be talking about in-memorium, Tennyson's elegy for his best friend, Alfred Henry Hallam. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about

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