The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus by Samuel Hollander (review)

HUMANITIES 227 mediation. The present reviewer hopes that this fine edition will be available long enough to effect such direct communication with many future generations of readers. (SYNDY M. CONGER) Samuel Hollander. The Economics afThomas Robert Malthus University of Toronto Press 1997. xviii, J054. $135.00 It is remarkable for a distinguished scholar to devote a lifetime to a single research program, but this is what Samuel Hollander has done with his four monumental studies of the classical e~onomists. The only other endeavour of comparable scope that comes to mind is Joseph Dorfman's five volumes on The Economic Mind in American Civilization. In this last study of Thomas Robert Malthus (the others are on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jo1m Stuart Mill), Hollander has made perhaps his greatest contribution to the history of economic thought, if for no other reason than because he has demonstrated concluSively that Malthus with the other three pioneers deserves a front-rank place in the march of history. Like two later prominent economists, William Stanley Jevons and John Maynard Keynes, Malthus began his career with a polemical essay, in his case on population. This had the advantage, and disadvantage, of bringing him to the attention in his own time and long after, not only of serious students of political economy but also of those with politica1 agendas of various kinds. Subsequently, however, Malthus then was ill served byboth his enemies and some ofhis friends. In the nineteenth century, for example, Marx and the Marxists castigated 'Parson Malthus' for his defence of landed interests and for perpetration of a 'libel on the human race' that seemed to say the poor have no one to blame for their poverty but themselves. In the twentieth century, Jolm Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reading Malthus's Principles ofPolitical Economy, 'rediscovered' one of the most perceptive anticipators of his own theory of macroeconomics. So Marxists on the left and anti-Keynesians on the rightboth had found reason . to condemn poor Malthus! Only after the Second World War did serious and detached study of Malthus begin. Joseph J. Spengler in particular argued that all of Malthus's writings should be taken together and not divided into demography and macroeconomics. Together, he said, they were about the supply of and demand for human beings, a subject of enormous significance throughout the social sciences. Hollander has continued in this tradition but with a thorouglmess that will dazzl~ even the most hardened scholars. Hollander's method is, above all, to examine the texts with great care and to tease out what the author really meant. He is much less concerned with the social and intellectual context in which the writing took place or the events that mattered most in the time period. This broader approach is associated with 228 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 some other recent interpreters, most notably Donald Winch in Riches and Poverty (1996). Hollander reconstructs Malthus's theory into a form that a modem economist-can understand and assess, but he does this mainly in words rather than by translation into all anachronistic mathematics of the present day. Continuity rather than revolutionary change has been the main storyline of Hollander's portrayal of the history of economics to date and this book strengthens this tradition. Malthus is seen as a bright beacon on the upward progress of the economics discipline. Neither Hollander's Malthus nor his whole series will be the last word on classical economics. Indeed it is a measure of Hollander's achievement that these studies have already engendered vigorous controversy and will continue to do so. But among admirers and critics alike this work must engender profound respect. (CRAUFURD D. GOODWIN) Samuel TaylorColeridge.Marginalia TV. Edited by H.J. Jackson andGeorge Whalley Volume 12 of Collected Works o/Samuel Taylor Coleridge Princeton University Press. xxiv, 870. us $150.00 The fourth volume of Coleridge's Marginalia collects his notes in over 'one hundred books in alphabetical order, 'Pamphlets to Shakespeare,' along with generous quotations from the works Coleridge annotates and the editors' notes and interpolations, which reflect an astonishing range of learning and scholarship. His earliest note comes from 1799, followed by a few from the next...