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ROBERT MALTHUS, ROUSSEAUIST

Part of: Malthusian Moments Special Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2019

CHRISTOPHER BROOKE Open the ORCID record for CHRISTOPHER BROOKE [Opens in a new window]
CHRISTOPHER BROOKE*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, cb3 9dtcb632@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

Although the argument of the Essay on population originated in a family disagreement between Malthus and his father Daniel, who idolized Rousseau, and the Essay itself attacks Condorcet and Godwin, both of whom drew on Rousseau's ideas about human perfectibility, Malthus's project can plausibly be seen as an extension of the social theory set out above all in Rousseau's Discourse on the origin of inequality. Malthus was animated by some of Rousseau's characteristic concerns, and he deployed recognizable versions of some of Rousseau's distinctive arguments, in particular relating to the natural sociability and natural condition of humankind, conjectural history, and political economy, especially with respect to the question of balanced growth. His arguments about ‘decent pride’, furthermore, that were emphasized in later editions of the Essay map neatly onto what has been called ‘uninflamed amour-propre’ in the Rousseau literature. When we treat the social question as a nineteenth-century question, or when we locate its origins in the post-Revolutionary political controversies of the 1790s, we risk losing sight of the way in which what was being discussed were variations on mid-eighteenth-century themes.

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Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Special Issue 1: Malthusian Moments , February 2020 , pp. 15 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

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44 The exposition of Rousseau that follows is indebted to the work of the late István Hont, shaped in general by the argument of his 2009 Carlyle Lectures, posthumously published as Sonenscher, Michael and Kapossy, Béla, eds., Politics in commercial society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge, MA, 2015)Google Scholar, and in particular by a 2011 paper, ‘Luxury and the route to revolution in Rousseau's Second discourse’. That paper remains unpublished, but Hont can be viewed presenting its argument in March 2012 in Lausanne at www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOniStEYo2c (accessed 31 Aug. 2017).

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64 Ibid., p. 557.

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72 Ibid., p. 377.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid., p. 378.

75 Ibid., pp. 381–2.

76 Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Foucault, Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, ed. Bouchard, D. F. (Ithaca, NY, 1977)Google Scholar, p. 139.

77 See, for example, Skinner, Quentin, ‘The limits of historical explanations’, Philosophy, 41 (1966), pp. 199–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Stephen Burt, ‘All possible humanities dissertations considered as single tweets’, The New Yorker, 10 June 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-possible-humanities-dissertations-considered-as-single-tweets (accessed 31 Aug. 2017).

79 Keith Tribe, The economy of the word (Oxford, 2015), pp. 42–3.

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81 Ricardo, David, ‘Notes on Malthus's Principles of political economy’, in Sraffa, Piero, ed., The works and correspondence of David Ricardo, ii (Cambridge, 1951)Google Scholar, p. 387.