Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (review)

498 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis. By Ronald Walter Greene. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1999; pp.vii + 273. $65.00. As the global population passed six million in October 1999, many noted the endurance of Thomas Robert Malthus's thesis that population pressures are indefinitely greater than the earth's ability to sustain them. Whether true or not, it continues to function as a topical resource in debates around immigration, abortion, welfare, global warming, and international development. Malthusian Worlds offers a dense narrative of the institutions and discourses through which Malthus's rhetoric passed to become social, economic, and foreign policy. It sweeps from the publication of Malthus's Essay on Population in 1798, to the contemporary social movements , bureaucracies, discourses, and technologies that regulate procreation. Greene stays tightly focused on the public arguments, metaphors, hierarchies, and other social constructions deployed relative to the population issue. He maps the uses, mutations, and contradictions of Malthusianism from its early formulations in political economy and utilitarianism, to its emergent neoliberal and feminist forms. The bulk of the book explains how the key elements of the "population apparatus" were established between 1945 and 1975, primarily via intersections with development , containment, and environmental discourses (6). The narrative is driven by a wealth of close readings using rhetoric's traditional critical vocabulary. Readers will find deft interpretations of presidential speeches, proceedings from the major population summits, and key texts by both the dominant figures in the population debate itself and adjacent discourse communities such as feminists. In mapping the complex "field of practical reasoning" that governs population , Greene focuses on rhetoric's contribution to the act of government. With healthy doses of Gramsci and Foucault, rhetoric is defined as the human technology of meaning-making, a technology that doesn't merely represent reality, but is materialized in governing apparatuses. Here, the specificity of rhetorical practices is expanded to include institutional positions, intellectual trends, and other "technologies " of deliberation (3-8). Indeed the book represents an ambitious synthesis of rhetoric with major social processes: capitalism, bureaucratic rationalization, and social differentiation and demarcation. The approach reflects a method that is interdisciplinary , anti-essentialist, non-reductive, and contextualized, and Greene uses the idea of an "apparatus" to denote just such a multi-dimensional historicism. This will definitely appeal to social science and humanities scholars who lean towards historicism , institutions, discourse, and argument. It will also be very useful as a datarich case study for scholars of critical rhetoric and policy-focused cultural studies, and for sociologists and political scientists sympathetic to the "rhetorical turn." The book will also add to considerations on the progress and promise of attempts to produce new socio-historical mappings that update Marxism. It bears Book Reviews 499 directly on discussions about the relative autonomy of the state, civil society, and political-economic dimensions of society. For Greene, the "deep structures" of capitalism , racism, and patriarchy do not determine in the last instance how Malthusian rhetorics travel. Greene resists the idea that rhetoric is reducible to structural specification and uses the notion of an "apparatus" to capture the liminal and fluid ways that rhetoric takes on a life of its own. Does this mode of textual criticism loosen the normative purchase radical thinkers strive for, i.e., does methodological pluralism imply toothless political pluralism? Does the move away from structures to "articulations" replace politics with cultural strategies, or does it broaden revolutionary politics to include the struggle for discursive consent? There is much to grapple with in this book. Following Foucault, Greene defines modern states in terms of their tendency to legitimate themselves through administrative functions designed to promote the general welfare. Parson Malthus is a constitutive element in the emergence of modern states because he denaturalized reproductive behaviors between men and women, thus inventing conjugal "Malthusian Couple" as a basic regulatory unit (11). The preeminent rhetorical significance of this construction is its ability to travel through other discourses and institutions, and over time become effective through state and para-state mechanisms. For example, Malthus's notion that healthy (working class) bodies tend to put strains on the national body became connected...