Setting the Stage
Thomas Robert Malthus was born on 13 February 1766 at The Rookery, near Dorking in Surrey and died in Bath on 29 December 1834. His father, Daniel Malthus, was a friend of David Hume and a great admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his philosophical novel Emile.
Three weeks after Robert’s birth these two philosophers came to visit him. Robert was educated first by his father and then, until he was 16, by Richard Graves, a clergyman friend of his father. In 1782, he went to the famous Dissenting Academy at Warrington, Lancashire, to be taught by a “heretical” clergyman, Gilbert Wakefield, a disciple of Rousseau. Malthus went to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784, where he studied mathematics, science and classics. In 1788, he graduated as Ninth Wrangler, and took orders. After he had left Cambridge, one of his tutors, William Frend, was removed from his fellowship because of his advocacy of Unitarianism and his opposition to the war with the French Republic.In 1793, Malthus was elected to a fellowship by his college, and took a curacy at Okewood, near his family’s home. In 1803, he was instituted rector of Walesby, Lincolnshire, and held the living for the rest of his life without having resided there. The following year, he married Harriet Eckersall. In 1805, he was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the East India College, situated from 1809 at Haileybury, where he lived until his death, thus becoming the first Professor of Political Economy in England. Most of Malthus’s contemporaries, even those who disagreed with his opinions, described him as a lovable man of considerable humour and underlined his affectionate and loyal nature and his intellectual honesty.
In 1796, Malthus wrote his first pamphlet, The Crisis, a View of the Present Interesting State of Great Britain, by a Friend to the Constitution, in order to criticize Pitt’s administration.
He failed to find a publisher, and the manuscript has unfortunately been lost. Nevertheless, some passages quoted by his two friends and biographers, William Empson and Bishop William Otter, indicate that he was already prompted by the desire to reduce the hardship of the poor and, more widely, interested in social problems of political economy. A close reading of his work cannot but convince the reader that his desire to improve the condition of the labouring classes would remain all his life; and that he intended to understand the true causes of their conditions, whether by poverty or by unemployment, in order to find appropriate remedies. In the introduction of the first edition of his Principles of Political Economy published in 1820, Malthus emphasizes the main difficulties inherent in such a task, particularly by stressing the principal cause of error in political economy: “a precipitate attempt to simplify and generalize” (1820b: 5). Simplifying by not acknowledging “the operation of more causes than one in the production of particular effects” (1820b: 6) and generalizing by not taking into account “the necessity of limitations and exceptions in a considerable number of important propositions” (1820b: 7) led to “crude and premature theories” (1820b: 6). Furthermore, on 26 January 1817, in a letter to Ricardo, Malthus writes: “A writer may, to be sure, make any hypothesis he pleases; but if he supposes what is not at all true practically, he precludes himself from drawing any practical inferences from his hypotheses” (Malthus in Ricardo 1951-73, VII: 122). Malthus’s willingness to account for complexity, limitations and exceptions in political economy could explain most of his disagreements with Ricardo and that the hope the latter expressed on 20 August 1818 in a letter to his friend: “I wish to have an opportunity of judging of your system as a whole” (Ricardo 1951-73, VII: 284) could not be realized.