Analysis and Ideology in Malthus's Essay on Population*

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that Robert Malthus composed his first, anonymous Essay on Population in 1798 in order to refute the ideas of human perfectibility advanced by Condorcet and Godwin. It is less widely realised that Malthus was not so much concerned, even then, to attack the idea of perfectibility in general as to demonstrate the impossibility of achieving it by theparticular route proposed by Condorcet, Godwin and the other 'Jacobins'. For the latter desired an unmaking of all existing institutions, above all the abolition or at least the drastic redistribution of private property. The subject of property is the key-stone that completes the fabric of political justice' wrote Godwin (1798, vol. 11, p.420), and let it never be forgotten that accumulated property is usurpation' (p.444). Apologists for the established order could afford to ignore perfectibility. But the political circumstances of 1798 made it urgently necessary to answer the Jacobin attack on property. Of all who rose to the challenge, Malthus was by far the most successful.The story of Malthus's crucial intervention in the antiJacobin debate of the 1790s, and of the far-reaching ideological and scientific consequences of that intervention, is long and complex. I have attempted to do it justice elsewhere (Waterman 1991) and to supply proper evidence for my belief that the chief target of the Essay was Godwin's attack upon 'the established administration of property'. What I propose in this article is to reconstruct the 'economic analysis' which may be found in the Essay, and to show how that analysis is consistent with the ideological purpose I have attributed to its author.Tivo misunderstandings may easily arise from the second of these aims and it is important that I should try to dispel them at the outset. In the first place, I make no claim that a mathematical model of Malthus's analysiseven if it perfectly captures the logical structure of his argumentcan prove that he wrote the Essay to counter the Jacobin attack on property.We can never prove that our theories are true: we may only falsify them. Having based my 'conjecture' upon textual and historical evidence therefore, it seems proper to expose it to the possibility of 'refutation'. If the mathematical reconstruction is congruent with an interpretation of the Essay as a defence of property, that interpretation survives the test of internal consistency.In the second place, no disparagement of Malthus's achievement is intended by the suggestion that it was ideologically motivated. Motives are never pure, nor need they be for knowledge * Research supported by SSHRCC and the University of Manitoba. The author is grateful to all who have made comments on previous drafts, especially Robert Dorfman, Samuel Hollander, Donald Winch and two anonymous referees. 203 ANALYSIS AND IDEOLOGY205

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