=================== HES POSTING ===================== [Posted on behalf of Henk Plasmeijer <[log in to unmask]>. -- RBE] The Talk of the Town in 1798 Henk W. Plasmeijer State University of Groningen, The Netherlands [log in to unmask] 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]