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The Talk of the Town in 1798
Henk W. Plasmeijer
State University of Groningen, The Netherlands
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In June 1798 the anonymously published _Essay on the Principle of
Population_ gave occasion to a polemic which made Malthus both famous and
notorious. In order to explain the dazzling success of Malthus's first
appearance it is often stressed that the book was politically hot stuff.
There can be no doubt it was. Malthus became in a twinkling extraordinary
influential: in 1800 William Pitt the younger stated in the House of
Commons that he would not introduce a promised amendment to the Poor Laws
which would favour large families, on which occasion he referred to
Malthus. However, many questions about the book's immediate success
remain.
Malthus's success in economic thought is perhaps even more puzzling. Within
twenty years the Principle of Population became an essential part of
Ricardian economics. It was not meticulously proven to be true. Even at
contemporary standards the Principle is one-sided. Retrospectively we may
conclude that at the time it was not the best theory around. In fact, many
subtleties put forward in earlier debates about supply reactions in the
labour market were driven into oblivion by Malthus's Principle.
What happened? The next story is about the events in 1798. In that year the
Essay was neither the first bestseller, nor the first book which made
feelings run high. In June a real scandal was going on. Malthus's book is
about the main issues in that scandal. In January 1798 William Godwin had
published his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of
Woman. In the popular press the 'chilly' philosopher became the object of
slander. Godwin and (posthumously) Mary Wollstonecraft were disreputed.
Their feminist ideals of freedom were ridiculed and put aside as immoral.
And before anybody could recover their breath Malthus came along. The title
page of the Essay promises 'remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin'. In
the book the harmful social consequences of feminist ideals are discussed.
The Essay connects these ideals, of which the main representative was Mary
Wollstonecraft, with the immoral behaviour of the labouring poor. And at
the time Mary Wollstonecraft's highly unusual conduct in life had got
about.
Why tell this story? Obviously, when the subjects of scientific inquiry and
public debate are so close to one another as they were then, the story of
the talk of the town in 1798 can help to understand why an idea which
normally would have raised many questions, could spread that rapidly.
Classical wage theory and population
The Essay ought to have raised many questions, particularly concerning its
main economic points. Malthus was not the first to stress a positive
relation between real income and population growth. Striking about the
Essay is that this relationship is stripped of the many subtleties with
which it was qualified in the populationist debates. The 'passion between
the sexes' is made the only governing principle. The essentials of
Malthus's Principle are well known. Food production increases
arithmetically and population geometrically. Without checks population
doubles every 25 year. Two kinds of checks are mentioned. The positive
checks (war, famine and pestilence) diminish relatively all of a sudden the
population with respect to food supply. These disasters can be modelled as
a discontinuous move in time of the origins of the two series. The
preventive checks (contraception, abortion and active stoicism, which in
the second Essay becomes moral restraint) shift the growth path of
population. For any given level of real income a labourer of high moral
standing decides to start a smaller family than the one living in the
rabbit colony in the slums of London.
For contemporary economic theory, and in particular Ricardian economics,
neither the priapic governing principle nor the 'private vices make public
disaster' proposition was relevant. For the then economists the 'passion
between the sexes' was something like a macro-economic production function
for the labour market, i.e. a black box with which for obvious reasons
nobody wants to be intellectually occupied. The Principle of Population is
just another way of looking at the familiar but questionable positive
relation between real income and labour supply. It added one figure to it:
at high levels of the real wage rate the growth of the labour force is
about 2.8% per year. As in earlier populationist views the supply of labour
was supposed to be negative at very low levels of the real wage rate.
Assuming continuity the classical economists jumped to the conclusion that
a 'natural' wage rate exists for which the growth of the labour supply is
zero. In order to get to the economic argument, no Malthusian Principle is
needed.
[The web version of the editorial includes here a figure illustrating the
effect of moral restraint on the natural wage rate.]
In 1798 the idea of a positive relation between real income and population
growth was very old. It was the main argument of the populationists,
according to whom the power of a nation depends on the number of its
citizens. But also in the Netherlands, where it was believed that the power
of the Republic depends on economic strength, the relation between income
and population was thoroughly discussed. E.g. a distinction was made
between the temporary effects (increasing life expectations) and lasting
effects, mainly immigration. So when in 1740 the forefather of all Dutch
people with the family name of Plasmeijer came in from Westphalia, Willem
Kersseboom (1690-1771), a founding father of demography and a follower of
William Petty, tried to investigate the financial consequences of many
demographic changes for the town of Utrecht. In France the Physiocrat and
populationist Francois Quesnay explained in an article, which he probably
read aloud in the salon of the King's mistress, that his package of
measures (a unique tax, laissez faire) would restore the power of the
kingdom by means of enhancing living standards and attracting immigration.
It did not occur to him, and neither did it to his audience, that
population growth could be related to loose morals.
It should be noted that the incidentally very modern immigration mechanism
produces the same result economically as the Malthusian Principle. Labour
supply is a strictly increasing function of national differences in living
standards. Also Adam Smith held the opinion that population would increase
with rising living standards. Smith's approach, however, is rather subtle
and embedded in many qualifications. E.g. when introducing the 'eligible'
American widow in the economic literature, he stresses an economic
incentive for having children:
A young widow with four or five young children, who, among the
middling or inferior ranks of people in Europe, would have so little
chance for a second husband, is there frequently courted as a sort of
fortune. The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements
to marriage. (Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8)
In the long run Smith's suggestion has proven to be more relevant than the
Malthusian Principle. And more heuristic. Any modern economist not knowing
anything about demography would say when reading Smith: "Well, this means
that at very low levels of the real wage rate we can get the positive
relationship between living standards and population growth, but since the
marginal disutility of raising children is increasing and the marginal
utility of money is decreasing, the relation is surely negative for high
living standards." It seems that Adam Smith's suggestion brings us back to
the very old idea which had to be rediscovered by Jevons: the backward
bending labour supply curve.
The scandal in 1798
In 1798 the talk of the town was not population pressure. It is often
reported that at the time it was believed that the population was growing
slowly. Three years later, when the results of the first census after many
years were published, it was brought out that this was wrong. The
population had grown explosively.
What occupied British public opinion in 1798 was among others Godwin's
book. The story is well documented (see Holmes 1988), although it is not in
our books on the history of economic thought. On September 10, 1797 Mary
Wollstonecraft had died, eleven days after having given birth to Mary
Godwin, later Mary Shelly. Within a couple of weeks William Godwin wrote
the Memoirs, which were published in January 1798. For a person who was
known as the 'chilly' philosopher the book is extraordinary emotional. It
is an incredible love story. Its audience was shocked, even Godwin's
allies. Godwin wrote very straightforwardly about Mary Wollstonecraft's
intentions to live the life of an independent woman, but also about the
difficulties she encountered, her love affairs, her love child, her suicide
attempts and so on. He also wrote about the way in which he and Mary had
organized their lives after they had fallen in love and why her pregnancy
was the reason to get married. In 1798 this was a very unusual book.
For conservative England Memoirs was the perfect occasion to attack
feminist and egalitarian ideals of freedom. Godwin's book was too
vulnerable. It bears witness to unbounded sorrow. The conservatives took
advantage of the situation and started throwing dirt. The fuss was pretty
nasty. The Anti-Jacobin made noise about almost every immorality
Wollstonecraft was supposed to represent, from unorthodox sexual behaviour
to the non-payment of creditors. The noise lasted years and obscenities
were not eschewed. As late as 1801 a 'poet' thought that Godwin had not
suffered enough.
William hath penn'd a waggon-load of stuff
and Mary's life at last he needs must write,
Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,
Till fairly printed off in black and white.
With wondrous glee and pride, this simple wight
Her brothel feats of wantonness sets down;
Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight,
How oft she cuckolded the silly clown,
And lent, O lovely piece!, herself to half the town.
The title of the poem, the "Vision of liberty," indicates clearly what the
fuss was about. By destroying Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's intellectual
and moral reputation conservative England tried to discredit the ideals of
the French revolution.
Wollstonecraft and Godwin were the perfect targets. Although definitely
opposed to revolutions or any other kind of violence, they were the main
English representatives of the ideals of the French Revolution.
Wollstonecraft's arguments in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
are well known: starting from the unqualified human right of
self-determination she argues among others for economic self-dependency of
women, for equal chances in education and in particular for the possibility
to end a personal relationship unilaterally. Marriage is a fraud. In his
Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) Godwin, as is also well known,
stresses the distribution of property as one of the main barriers to an
egalitarian society. When he discusses feminist matters, he is merely
echoing Wollstonecraft.
The recipe for a bestseller
It is often argued that Malthus's first Essay was an integral part of the
campaign against Jacobinical literature. Waterman (1991: 7) even argues
that the book was an anti-Jacobin defence of property rights embedded in
the prevailing religious world-view. I would not like to go that far. Winch
(1987: 17) is right in making the necessary differentiations. The Essay is
not a political pamphlet. Moreover, the culmination of the anti-Jacobinical
campaign was the commotion concerning Godwin's Memoirs. Malthus had nothing
to do with that. However, there can hardly be any doubt that in that
agitated intellectual climate almost any book which deals with Godwin and
the 'passion between the sexes' would have attracted a lot of attention.
Since there is no point in speculating about how the Essay would have fared
without that fuss, we can leave the matter with the suggestion that Malthus
had a recipe for a bestseller. Malthus may have sensed this, for he wrote
the Essay in a great hurry.
After the Essay was published the conservative forces appear to have gone
into the offensive. As is well known, the Anti-Jacobin campaign against the
ideals of the French revolution started with Burke's Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790). Burke's arguments for the status quo, however,
are purely defensive and very traditional. He had a hard time with his
critics, among whom were Godwin and Wollstonecraft. And at the very moment
that Godwin is put in the pillory, Malthus comes up as a dispassionate
scientist who argues that although it is true that the French ideals
promise a marvelous future, in real life these ideals must be in accordance
with the 'natural laws of society'; for otherwise they will bring us
misery. In other words, the viability of human rights (and in particular
Wollstonecraft's rights of women) had to be evaluated in the light of
'natural laws'. This is a scientific programme. The increasing
offensiveness of the conservatives is partly explained by an increasing
reliance on scientific arguments after June 1798.
Many subjects discussed by Malthus were those which were also discussed in
the streets. To be sure, Malthus stays far from that noise, he addresses
Godwin's ideas with dignity and he does not mention Wollstonecraft once,
comme il faut. However, the Essay is about the social consequences of the
passion between the sexes and it stresses moral principles. The main
argument is not that loose morals and in particular a perfect freedom in
the commerce of the sexes is morally objectionable, although there can be
no doubt that Malthus held that opinion. It is that looseness comes at high
costs for society. Such an argument corresponds astonishingly well with the
prejudices which at the time were being mobilized against Wollstonecraft's
conduct in life.
There is more to it. Perhaps I see ghosts everywhere, but when reading
chapter 10 of the first Essay once again it occurred to me that there may
be a hidden meaning which we do not recognize anymore. E.g. Malthus argues
that loose morals and the resulting population pressure leads to poverty,
which will drive out feelings of love.
The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted
emotions of the soul.
What is he referring to and what is he saying? Are these the softer and
more exalted emotions which Godwin shows on almost every page of the
Memoirs? And is he suggesting that when they fell in love the feminist and
the philosopher lost sight of reality? Or is this just another sweeping
generalization of an economic cynic?
Malthus directly attacks the idea that marriage is a fraud. He attributes
it to Godwin, but he must have known that Wollstonecraft was its main
representative. Marriage is, according to Malthus, a natural institution.
Love has got nothing to do with it. In the natural order the logic behind
it is an insurance principle. This is not the insurance Smith had in mind
when he talked about the economic value of the children in America.
Malthus's 'natural' principle is one which protects the English mothers.
The argument is that when morals are loose and the father not known, the
population explosion is at the expense of the decent part of society.
Malthus warns us that there is no such thing as fraternity and argues that
there is a limit to what society is willing to pay for these wicked women.
That a woman should at present be almost driven from society for an offence
which men commit nearly with impunity, seems to be undoubtedly a breach of
natural justice.
This means that it is foolish for a woman to strive for liberty. More in
particular, it is very unreasonable that she should try to be economically
independent from a husband, both from the point of view of society and with
an eye to her own economic security. Finally, and once again relying on a
'natural law' argument, Malthus wipes the floor with equality: men and
women cannot be equal.
When those two fundamental laws of society, the security of property, and
the institution of marriage, were once established, inequality of
conditions must necessarily follow.
Are you ready to accept that in 1798 the Anti-Jacobins, who did their best
and used every means to put Wollstonecraft and Godwin in a bad light, must
have believed that Malthus had nicely done away with the 'liberty, equality
and fraternity' slogan? They had reasons to hail his Essay as a scientific
masterpiece.
Final Remarks
Whether 1798 was a sad year is for the reader to decide. For Godwin it
certainly was. In 1798 the 'dismal science' showed its ugly face and
feminism was to be buried for more than seventy years. But whatever we
think about the events, the story about 1798 should be told. It makes us
once again aware of the importance of the intellectual climate in which
economic ideas are put forward.
Literature
Holmes, R., 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, London:
Holder and Stoughton
Holmes, R., 1988, The Feminist and the Philospher, London: Holder and
Stoughton. The same story is told in the introduction to Wollstonecraft by
Godwin.
Waterman, A.M.C., 1991, Revolution, Economics and Religion, Christian
Political Economy, 1798-1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Winch, D., 1987, Malthus, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wollstonecraft, M., 1796, W. Godwin, 1798, A short Residence in Sweden and
Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, Penguin books, 1987
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