Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)

Founder of English bourgeois vulgar political economy, demographer, and clergyman; pioneer of modern population studies.

Malthus was born on February 13, 1766, in Dorking, Surrey, England, into a family of landed gentry. He studied philosophy and theology at the Jesus College, Cambridge University, from 1784 to 1788. In 1798, he joined the Church of England as a curate and served as clergy. In 1805, the East India Company established the East India Company College near London, where Malthus was employed as a professor of history and political economy until his death on December 23, 1834. During this period, Malthus published some works of political economy, notably The Nature of Rent (1815), The Measure of Value (1823), The Principles of Political Economy (1820), etc.

In 1798, Malthus anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population (full title: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of William Godwin, Marquis de Condorcet, and Other Writers), which attracted wide attention. According to the book, the passion between the sexes was necessary and would remain nearly in its present state, and that food was necessary to the existence of man. He held that the power of population was indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population increased in a geometrical ratio (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...), while subsistence increased in an arithmetical ratio (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...), thus causing over-population, and inevitably giving rise to starvation, misery, unemployment, and other phenomena. Only natural causes (accidents and aging), catastrophes (wars and plagues and famines of all kinds), moral restrictions, and vices (including infanticide, murder, birth control, and promiscuous intercourse) could limit excessive population growth. Although Malthus favored the use of moral restraint (including late marriage and abstinence) as a means of controlling population growth, he recommended that such measures be taken only with respect to the working masses and the poorer classes. He believed that private ownership of property helped to curb population growth and that the lower social classes were more responsible for social ills, and he was therefore strongly opposed to the cause of social relief.

As a representative of the bourgeoisified landed gentry, Malthus’s theory of political economy opposed the industrial bourgeoisie from the standpoint of the landed gentry, and opposed the proletariat from the standpoint of the landlord class and the bourgeoisie. Marx gave a powerful critique and rebuttal to Malthus’s vulgar theory of political economy and theory of population, pointing out that Malthus, instead of advancing beyond Ricardo, seeks to drag political economy back to where it was before Ricardo, even to where it was before Adam Smith and the Physiocrats. Marx deeply criticized Malthus’s theory of population and pointed out that there is no such thing as a universal law of population, but that every specific historic mode of production has its own specific laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. In the capitalist society, over-population and over-production coexist simultaneously, and the phenomenon of unemployment and misery of workers under the capitalist system is not caused by “absolute surplus-population”, but determined by the general laws of accumulation of capital and by the capitalist system. Marx pointed out in Capital, Vol. 1, that the working population produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent that is always increasing. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.