Thomas Malthus

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus (February, 1766 – December 23, 1834), who is usually known as Thomas Malthus, although he preferred to be known as "Robert Malthus," was an English demographer and political economist best known for his pessimistic but highly influential views. Although it is popularly assumed that it was these pessimistic views that gave economics the nickname Dismal Science, the phrase was actually coined by the historian Thomas Carlyle in reference to an anti-slavery essay written by John Stuart Mill.

Critics of Malthus

Theoretical and political critiques of Malthus and Malthusian thinking emerged soon after the publication of the first Essay on Population, most notably in the work of the reformist industrialist Robert Owen and the essayist William Hazlitt. The highpoint of opposition to Malthus's ideas in the middle of the nineteenth century was the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who argued that what Malthus saw as the problem of the pressure of population on the means of production was, in fact, that of the pressure of the means of production on population. They thus viewed it in terms of their concept of the labor reserve army. In other words, the seeming excess of population that Malthus attributed to the seemingly innate disposition of the poor to reproduce beyond their means was actually a product of the very dynamic of capitalist economy. For a review of the historical development of Malthusian thinking and its role in the evolution of capitalist society through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Eric B. Ross's The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (1998).

Related Topics:
Robert Owen - William Hazlitt - Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels

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