Malthus, Thomas Robert
(1766-1834)
Economist, famous for his Essay on the
Principle of Population (1798). Perhaps because of the Utilitarian climate
of the times, his theory that population when unchecked would increase
geometrically while food production could increase only arithmetically
had tremendous influence. It followed logically from his thesis that people
would rapidly outstrip the supply of food, and since birth control was
immoral, only wars, famine, plague, and poverty made it possible for human
life to continue. The Philosophical Radicals (the Utilitarians) and most
especially many of the factory owners of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries combined this theory with the laissez-faire economics
of David Ricardo and James Mill and the utilitarian calculus of Jeremy
Bentham (and their own self-interest) to argue that increasing the comforts
of the poor did them no favor: short-term comfort would rapidly give way
to long-term misery.
Ultimately more important was the influence
that Malthus had on Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). When transferred
from humankind to the natural world, Malthus' theory provided Darwin with
the basis for his idea of natural selection, which he believed to be the
mechanism by which some species and individuals survive while others do
not. This essentially Malthusian explanation distinguishes Darwin's work
from that of earlier evolutionists like Chambers, Cuvier, and his grandfather
Erasmus Darwin.
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