Malthus and the Intellectuals

Abstract

If we adopt the cynical definition of a classic, a work that everyone cites and no one reads, then An Essay on the Principle of Population must be designated a superclassic-written by a man whose name has entered all the Western languages but whose central ideas are often misunderstood even by professional demographers. Part of the difficulty lies in the confusions and half-contradictions that Malthus introduced as he developed his ideas over his lifetime. But the main basis of misunderstanding, now no less than a century and a half ago, is that there is hardly a cherished ideology, left or right, traditional or modernist, that is not brought into question by the principle of population. Reactions of contemporaries set the stage for later false views. Not all the commentary on Malthus's theory was negative, of course, but even some of the positive reaction to it helped reinforce misconceptions about it. Clergymen were divided: some denounced the principle of population as blasphemous, and those who approved of it incorporated Malthus into their number, so that later generations remember him not as a professor, which he was for the whole of his mature life, but as the Reverend T. R. Malthus. David Ricardo, who perhaps more than any