Malthus’s sacred history: outflanking civil history in the late Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

This essay locates Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in the historiography of his time. It does so by clarifying the manner in which Malthus used his account of population-food dynamics to retell the grand narrative of Roman decline leading to barbarism, feudalism, and then commerce. The result of Malthus’s intervention was to demote in importance both the actions of the usual historical actors – legislators, princes, and parties – and the historical contexts in which they were portrayed as acting. Such contexts were typically rendered in terms of laws, customs, and political interests, but, on Malthus’s account, these are merely contingent factors compared with the eternal laws that underlie human history. Malthus’s Essay thus represents an example of a more general phenomenon detectable in the late eighteenth century: the demotion of erudition and source criticism by those pursuing theological and philosophical understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Malthus
• historiography
• context
• political economy
• Pocock

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alex Cook, Ian Hesketh, Nick Heron, Ben Huf, Ian Hunter, Amy Jelacic, David Kearns, and Knox Peden for comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Henry-James Meiring for drawing my attention to the role of materialism in Malthus’s thought. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE130101505).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Jean le Rond D’Alembert’s condescending entry on ‘erudition’ in the Encyclopédie (1755) and Immanuel Kant’s subordination of ‘scriptural scholarship’ to the ‘pure religion of reason’ in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason ([1793] 1996).

2. By contrast, Rosario Lopez, in her review of Samuel Moyn’s and Andrew Sartori’s Global Intellectual History (2013), makes the questionable move of equating ‘context’ with ‘temporal and spatial units of study’ (Lopez 2016, 155). This and similar definitions of context are an enabling move for those who wish to reject ‘context’ as a master concept because of its purported restriction of ideas to a time and place, as if reception history did not exist and were not central to contextual history. For the spatial metaphor as central to straw-person critiques of contextualism see Specter (2016). For examples of the critiques in action, see Koskenniemi (2013) and Orford (2013). Ian Hunter’s intervention is typically forceful, revealing that most of the contemporary critiques of contextualism appear to repeat arguments that first emerged with the dialectical brand of philosophical history in the nineteenth century (2019).

3. Note that defending Smith’s reputation was a major aim for Malthus as he battled David Ricardo over the next two decades, most notably in his Principles of Political Economy, where Malthus positioned himself as the true heir to Smith. Of course, throughout this process Malthus was recasting Smith’s arguments in his own framework (see especially [1820] 1986, 5–18).

4. Smith [1762–3] 1983 cited by set of student notes and paragraph.

5. Smith [1776] 1976 cited by book, chapter, section, and paragraph, where relevant. Note: this text is referenced as ‘1776’, the year of first publication, but the Glasgow edition takes the third edition of 1784 as the base text.

6. But note that the ‘mercantile system’ should be assessed as a caricature of the rival approaches to understanding the relationship between trade and state power (see Walter 2015).

7. The most important treatment of this contest is provided by Keith Tribe, who has shown that the central divergence between the two writers was the role of the statesman in organizing the polity and providing it with order (1995, 1988).

8. Terming this ‘politics’ is imperfect, since we are dealing with ‘office talk’ – prescribing duties and virtues for an officeholder (see Condren 2006).

9. The other factor was the role of coastal towns in importing luxuries from abroad and exchanging them with the country for surplus produce.

10. The term used by Dugald Stewart when describing Smith’s work ([1793] 1980, 293).

11. See, for example, volume one of Sir Henry Spelman’s Archaeologus (London, 1626), described by Pocock as ‘historical inquiry into the past of an organized society’ that differed from the society of the investigator’s present (Pocock 1957, 95).

12. Brady’s Full and Clear Answer to a Book, Written by William Petit, Esq. (1681) was an uncompromising attack on the Whig named in the title. In other words, this was historiography in the service of a polemic regarding the nature of royal power and, as Pocock has argued, this is the less familiar side of the Filmerian controversy that is typically approached in relation to Locke’s unhistorical Two Treatises.

13. A more general feature of Smith’s jurisprudence. See Haakonssen (1981, Chapters 5, 6, 7).

14. These are two insurmountable obstacles for those providential readings of Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ in Wealth of Nations: two of the five books in Wealth of Nations are dedicated to explaining why it did not work; an omnipotent God can hardly be bested by incompetent landlords. See, for example, Harrison (2011, 29–49).

15. This position was a source of conflict between Smith and Scotland’s moderates (see Sher 1985, 236).

16. By contrast, Gibbon, no doubt Malthus’s source, gave Alaric two chapters ([1776–89] 1994, Vol. 2, Chapters 30 and 31), Attila two chapters (Gibbon [1776–89] 1994, Vol. 2, Chapters 34 and 35), and Khan one (Gibbon [1776–89] 1994, Vol. 3, Chapter 64). Consider Gibbon’s treatment of Attila, whose character we encounter, along with the nature of his court and his treatment of ambassadors, and Attila’s ‘penetration of a statesman’ that allowed him to turn the tide in his siege of Aquileia by interpreting an omen to motivate his soldiers. Attila’s victory opened the way for his prolonged invasion of Italy, causing the dispersal of those prosperous peoples whose flight created Venice. Attila the ‘savage destroyer’ was therefore judged by Gibbon to have ‘undesignedly laid the foundation of a republic, which revived, in the feudal state of Europe, the art and spirit of commercial industry’ (Gibbon [1776–89] 1994, Vol. 2, 345). In other words, Gibbon’s history was political history – narrating the actions of statesman and legislators – and did not presume time as the element in which divine impositions were born by humanity but as the element of sheer historical contingency.

17. The 1803 and 1826 texts are collated in this edition. On the changes between editions, see James (1979, Chapter 3) and Bashford and Chaplin (2016, Part II).

18. Sinclair’s study could hardly have been what Malthus truly had in mind: it was completely unwieldy, being organized by parish, with each parish described with headings such as ‘Rent’, ‘Climate’, and ‘Miscellaneous Observations’ (Sinclair 1791–99). Given the lack of materials, Malthus availed himself of voyager accounts, especially David Collins’s, where the savage state had found an illustration in New South Wales, with women again bearing the brunt of misery (Malthus [1803] 1986a, 24). On Collins see Bashford and Chaplin (2016, 101–114).

19. Malthus’s engagement with Robertson later in the Essay was similarly jaundiced, simply noting and correcting Robertson’s claim that the northern barbarians had ceased to swarm south and westward because the population was drained over a period of two hundred years. Rather, Malthus averred, the population-food ratio rendered it axiomatic that a people could double in 25 years, such that over 200 years the hordes could have regenerated over one hundred times; contra Robertson, the barbarians were stopped by gunpowder ([1803] 1986a, 72–3).

20. A point insisted on by Hume in his discussion of party: ‘Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extra ordinary and unaccountable phaenomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs’ (1994, 36).

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Ryan Walter

Ryan Walter is Associate Professor at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Queensland. He studies the history of political thought in the long eighteenth century.