Thomas Malthus’s Rhetorical Political Economy

ABSTRACT

David Ricardo and his followers forged rational argumentation and empirical verification into the discipline of classical political economy. Thomas Malthus distinguished his own view of the discipline from Ricardian social science by prudentially applying his rationally derived and empirically verified models to complex historical circumstances. He theorized this addition in the second edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, refined it in his Principles of Political Economy, and he practiced prudential argumentation in his arguments about the corn laws (1814–15). This Malthusian political economy is rhetorical in two senses of the word. First, Malthus inserted prudence (a virtue associated with rhetoric since antiquity) into political economy. Second, by appealing to people’s lived experiences, Malthus made political economy popularly persuasive.

Acknowledgments

As always, I benefitted from the advice given by my blind reviewers. For this article, in particular, however, I owe a heartfelt thanks to Ned O’Gorman who patiently coached me—through multiple revisions—out of a confused mess and into a coherent argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For examples of economists engaging with and building on McCloskey’s work, see Stettler (1995) and Quinn (1996). For a thoughtful explanation of why McCloskey’s rhetorical method ran counter to the dominant trends in neoclassical economics, see Mirowski (1988, 137–160).

2. Aune’s Rhetoric and Marxism inaugurated the political turn in the rhetoric of economics, by explaining that “the future of any Socialist politics depends on its coming to grips with the problematic of rhetoric” (1994, x). His Selling the Free Market analyzed public arguments about economics, claiming that “[r]hetorical practice constantly reconstitutes our collective notions of character and community” (2001, 3). Many have since followed Aune’s lead. In the realm of rhetoric, economics, and political theory, for instance Joshua Hanan has contended that the “problematic of rhetoric” constitutes the “materialist problematic of the economy itself” (2014, 69). Hanan picks up on Ronald Walter Greene’s conceptualization of “communication as a living labor to better understand how communication is incorporated, captured, and exploited by capitalism” (2006, 89). Recent rhetorical analyses of public argumentation about economics advance Aune’s second scholarly agenda. Crystal Colombini, for example, has examined how “rhetors assume authority in order to keep markets intervention-free” (2015, 119). Likewise, Thomas Goodnight and Sandy Green (2010) offer “economic criticism” of public argumentation while ignoring McCloskey’s disciplinary interest (2010, 116).

3. Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm shifts” explains how epistemic incommensurability allows for radical revolutions in scientific knowledge (1996 [1962], 42–51). Andrew Abbott’s model of “fractal cycles” accounts for cohesion within sociology by pointing to structural homologies that persist along internal divisions and chronological developments (2001, 22–33).

4. Reduced to numbers – such as wages, rent, and profit – human interaction could become a sterile transhistorical drama featuring a tendential falling rate of profit and a concluding steady state: “The mode of being of economics is no longer linked to a simultaneous space of differences and identities, but to the time of successive productions” (Foucault 1970, 256).

5. Malthus showed Ricardo an early draft of his Principles, and the two men met in December of 1820 to discuss Ricardo’s objections. Ricardo kept his notes but never followed through on his plan to publish. Ricardo’s manuscript was forgotten until 1919 and has since been published as 2004c Notes on Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy.

6. Ricardo added roughly five pages to his chapter on Malthus’s theory of rent, agreeing with Malthus’s general theory but disagreeing with his conclusion that “the whole money value of all the commodities in the country must sink exactly in proportion to the fall in the price of corn” (Ricardo 2004d, 417).