The Malthus Effect: population and the liberal government of life

Abstract

This paper identifies and elucidates what it calls the Malthus Effect from two perspectives: a genealogical-theoretical one and an empirical-diagnostic one. The first concerns its implications for Michel Foucault's genealogy and conceptions of modern governmentality. The second suggests that Malthusian concerns have an enduring presence in recent and contemporary politics. In them we find a government of life that tethers the question of poverty to that of population, as both a national and international concern, links biopolitics to questions of national security and is a key source of the modern environmental movement. It remains present in areas such as welfare reform and immigration policy, notions of sustainability and in the global public health and environmental movements. It takes the form of a genopolitics, a politics of the reproductive capacity of human populations and the human species.

Keywords:

• population
• biopolitics
• genopolitics
• sustainability
• security
• poverty

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Mitchell Dean

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society (2nd ed., Sage, 2010). His most recent book is The signature of power: Sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics (Sage, 2013). His previous books include The constitution of poverty: Toward a genealogy of liberal governance (Routledge, 2011 [1991]), Governing societies: Political perspectives on domestic and international rule (Open University Press, 2007) and Critical and effective histories: Foucault's methods and historical sociology (Routledge, 1994). He is the editor with Barry Hindess of Governing Australia: Studies in contemporary rationalities of government (Cambridge University Press, 1998).