The “Institutional” Approach

Finally, the third approach is the one we decided to call “institutional”. According to those who adhere to this view, the disproportion between population and resources does not derive either from natural laws or from the behaviour of workers.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the debates over Malthus’s principle were carried on in various contexts and were not limited to the strictly economic, demographic and statistical sphere of study. The economists, too, took part in the debate and were not insensitive to non-economic doctrines commonly held in the nineteenth century, such as, for example, the biological approach of Herbert Spencer (Spencer 1852). We have therefore tried to choose those contributions from the vast literature of the period that opposed Malthus’s principle mainly on grounds of economic analysis, and above all were intent on confuting the theoretical and practical implications developed by classical economists, starting from an institutional approach.

In this heterogeneous group of critics of the “principle of population”, we analyse the positions of Jean-Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, the group of “Ricardian socialists” and Karl Marx.