The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew

Abstract

WITH THE PUBLICATION OF Thomas Malthus's first Essay on Principles of Population in 1798, social and economic significance of vigorous body was radically reconceptualized. By insisting that healthy bodies eventually generate a feeble social organism, Malthus departed from nearly all his contemporaries.' Such predecessors as Adam Smith and David Hume, who also wrote of of and its checks, were certainly cognizant of population size as an important factor in social well-being. However, they maintained a two-millennia-old tradition of seeing individual body as sign-both as metaphor and as source-of health or infirmity of larger social body. Hence they viewed rapid reproduction as simply an index of a healthy state. Hume writes, as there is in all men, both male and female, a desire and power of generation more active than is ever universally exerted, restraints ... must proceed from some difficulties in men's situation, which it belongs to a wise legislature carefully to observe and remove.2 Thus, he continues, Every wise, just and mild government, by rendering condition of its subjects easy and secure will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. Hume is typical of eighteenth-century writers in seeing no apparent contradiction, either actual or latent, between individual physical potency and social vitality. In this one particular, his social vision is uncharacteristically static (Every wise, just and mild government ... will always abound most in people) and based on assumption that human biological nature itself is not at fault (the restraints ... must proceed from some difficulties in men's situations). For Enlightenment utopians, link between healthy individual and social bodies was even more direct; in works of Condorcet and William Godwin, whom Malthus explicitly takes as antagonists, hopes of perfect society were often founded on possibility of biological perfectability. Malthus's Essay is first work to counter this utopianism, not with reminders of fallen state of human race, its imperfections and frailties, but with a far more devastating evocation of its most redoubtable power, power it shares with all other animal species and that exercises itself almost automatically as a biological function: the power of population. The fact that populations have a tendency to increase