The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (review)

As we pass the bicentennial year of the publication of his Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus is still very much with us. He is among the three or four great economists of the past the mention of whom can bring a nod of recognition even from those who have never studied economics. His name, sometimes in adjectival form, features in many popular discussions of the link between population and the natural environment. (The business press, in particular, delights in applying the “Malthusian” label to those it deems overly concerned about the economic or environmental impact of increasing human numbers.) But if Malthus’s ideas remain in wide circulation two centuries after their initial appearance, so, sadly, do the distortions and misinterpretations of those ideas. In truth, Malthusian doctrine has always lent itself to vulgarization by both critics and supporters. Many who have written about Malthus plainly have not met even the most basic qualifying test for doing so, namely, to have read carefully what the “parson” actually wrote. The best antidote to a vulgarized, essentialized Malthus is a carefully researched one, and that we have in Samuel Hollander’s latest book.

Hollander gave notice in the preface to The Economics of Adam Smith (1973) that he intended to follow up with book-length studies of the other major classical economists—Malthus, David Ricardo, J. S. Mill, and Karl Marx. The volumes on Ricardo (1979) and Mill (1985) arrived in due course, and now, with Malthus, we have the fourth number of “Studies in Classical Political Economy.” If Hollander still plans a Marxian finale to the series, it presumably will happen some time in the next millennium.

One thousand fifty-three pages on Malthus! Hollander required only one-third the space to cover Smith, whom few would judge the less significant economist. (His Ricardo ran to 759 pages; his Mill to 1,037.) And there is a good deal of Malthusian matter not seriously engaged in this long book—notably the protracted war of words among Malthus, his allies, and opponents known as the “Malthusian controversy.” William Hazlitt, S. T. Coleridge, and John Rickman, for example, are absent from these pages. William Cobbett is mentioned in a single footnote, Robert Southey, in two. Francis Place, whose adoption of the Malthusian doctrine gives Malthus a solid, if ironic, claim to the title of intellectual godfather to the birth control movement, is referred to but once. Even William Godwin, the prime polemical target of the 1798 essay, receives minimal attention. But previous books—James Bonar’s venerable Malthus and His Work (1885), Kenneth Smith’s The Malthusian Controversy (1951), William Petersen’s Malthus (1979), and most recently Donald Winch’s Riches and Poverty (1996)—have cultivated this ground rather thoroughly. Moreover, the theological dimension of Malthusian thought has been carefully expounded in Tony Waterman’s Revolution, Economics, and Religion (1991), and on the biographical side, Patricia James surely delivered the last word in her Population Malthus (1979).

This leaves the economics of Malthus to Hollander’s comprehensive—no, exhaustive—treatment. Malthus’s contributions to the areas of money, banking, value and distribution theory, trade policy, development, growth, macroeconomics, and methodology are laid out in more detail by Hollander than by any previous scholar. One wonders whether anyone since Malthus himself has been as deeply versed as Hollander in the entire Malthusian oeuvre—the multiple editions of the Essay, the two Principles editions, the shorter books, the pamphlets, the travel diaries, the reviews, and the correspondence. To have carved some order out of this mountain of material is in itself no mean feat. Hollander organizes the early chapters mainly along textual lines. Thus chapter 1 focuses on the first four editions of the population essay; chapter 2, on the early correspondence with Ricardo; chapter 3, on the Inquiry into Rent; chapter 4, on the later correspondence with Ricardo; and chapter 5, on the fifth (1817) edition of the population essay. Much of the analysis here centers on what...