Gregory King, Robert Malthus and the Origins of English Social Realism

Abstract

In this article I compare King and Malthus in respect of their ability to penetrate what is here called social opacity, the resistance of all social structures to objective analysis by contemporaries, demographic and other forms of analysis. It accords to King the distinction to have been the first person ever to have recognized the issue, to have set out to penetrate social opacity as it was in his generation, and thus to have been the first to write out a systematic account of any social structure in what, in his age, could be called objective terms. His attitude is described as one of Gregorian realism. Malthus is equally distinguished by realism, but in a very different, much more theoretical mode, reminiscent of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His attitude is named Malthusian realism in contrast to Gregorian. It is insisted that both Gregorian and Malthusian realism are equally parts of the required equipment and outlook of all social scientists, demographers especially. On the way to the conclusion that David Glass, in whose honour the paper was delivered as a lecture, was a Gregorian, it is shown that the originator of the notion of deliberate, redistributive transfers from the propertied to the poor by means of the national taxation system was Tom Paine in Rights of Man (1790).