13 - Sensing the Population Debate: Poverty, Ecology and the Senses in Malthus and his Critics

Summary

In his 1807 critique of An Essay on the Principle of Population, William Hazlitt compared the conclusions of its author, Thomas Robert Malthus, to the observations of city-dwellers who liked to ramble through the country in pursuit of a reinvigorating experience of nature. Actually, Malthus's Essay deliberately eschewed the rural escapism that influenced picturesque tourists and readers of pastoral poetry. Instead, the book privileged economic over aesthetic concerns, while upholding a new pessimism regarding the capacity of the earth to sustain human life. Far from searching for objects of rural beauty, Malthus's work on population drew on the senses to elaborate a range of social and ecological issues. The problem, according to Hazlitt, was that ‘his attempts at philosophy’ were like the ‘exploits’ of urban tourists, who sought to ‘taste the fresh air’ in the country, but who got ‘no further than Paddington, White Conduithouse, or Bagnigge-wells, unable to leave the smoke, the noise and dust, to which they [had] so long been used!’ Hazlitt acknowledged, then, that Malthus's Essay was neither a picturesque nor a realistic description. On the contrary, in Hazlitt's opinion, Malthus rejected idealistic visions only to embrace a negative fantasy of nature as the embodiment of the disfigured sensory environment created by commercial modernity.

First published in 1798, Malthus's Essay ushered in a new ecological perspective in which scarce environmental resources placed limits on economic development and population growth. This ecological view overturned many Enlightenment ideas of improvement, notably the belief that a large, expanding population was a laudable goal attainable through a perpetual increase in the productivity of the land. Malthus articulated his alternative pessimistic view in scientific terms. And yet, there was a social ideology underpinning this ecological outlook. Malthus argued that an important means of curtailing population growth involved restricting the right of the poor to parish relief, an entitlement deemed to foster idleness and irresponsible breeding. Along with this reframing of poverty, Malthus's dour, utilitarian attitude to nature came into conflict with a rival Romantic sensibility, leading to a bitter population debate. Anticipating more recent discussions of Malthusian ideas, which returned to popularity in the 1960s but caused heated disagreement in ensuing decades, a crucial feature of this debate was the vexed link between social justice and environmental sustainability.