Thomas Malthus

English Anglican clergyman and political economist (1766–1834), born at Rookery, in Surrey, into a wealthy and intellectually restless family — his father was a personal friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — ordained a priest of the Church of England and later appointed, in 1805, the first professor of history and political economy in all England, a chair created at the East India Company College to train colonial administrators. His fundamental work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), initially published anonymously as a direct response to the Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility and indefinite social progress found in thinkers such as William Godwin and Condorcet, sets out a demographic thesis of implacable, pessimistic logic: human population, when unchecked, tends to grow in geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16...), while food resources, subject to the land's law of diminishing returns, can at most increase in arithmetic progression (2, 4, 6, 8...), inevitably condemning any society to periodically collide with the limits of subsistence. Malthus distinguished between 'preventive checks' on population growth — such as late marriage or moral restraint, which he advocated from his religious standpoint — and 'positive checks' — famine, disease and war — which nature imposed inexorably when the former failed, concluding with notable scientific coldness that any improvement in the living conditions of the poor was doomed to be fleeting, since it would automatically generate population growth returning the population to subsistence-level misery, an argument he used to harshly criticise the English Poor Laws of his time. Although revised and nuanced in successive editions, and although the subsequent agricultural revolution and birth control have empirically challenged many of his predictions, his analysis decisively influenced Darwin and Wallace in formulating natural selection, and the term 'Malthusian' remains central to contemporary debates on population growth, natural resources and sustainability.

2 works

• An Essay on the Principle of Population
• The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn