This blog accompanies the Historical Journal article Malthus, Nineteenth-Century Socialism, and Marx by Gareth Stedman Jones.

Radical and socialist reactions to Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population may seem a relatively obscure chapter in 19th century intellectual history. But appearances can be deceptive. Malthus’s Essay was a response to Political Justice (1793) the utopian tract by former preacher and leading representative of ‘rational dissent’, William Godwin. Godwin believed moral and political improvement would follow from the increase in knowledge. Malthus, an Anglican parson, chose not to refute Godwin, not by citing Scripture or Original Sin, but by ‘turning our eyes to the book of Nature, where alone we can find God as he is’. He shocked his readers by arguing that while increases in the means of subsistence had proceeded arithmetically with the extension of agriculture, the increase of population had proceeded at a geometrical rate, imposing the constant danger of overpopulation and starvation.

There has never been any doubt about the immediate sensation produced by Malthus’s claims. But in my article in the HJ, I argue that the need to answer Malthus led to the most profound recasting of 19th century radical thought, conjoining science and Enlightenment with a radical, and eventually revolutionary social movement.

Reaction to Malthus was formative in three ways. Firstly, it led to the earliest formulation in Britain of what became known as ‘socialism’, originally set out in 1813-1816 in the writings of the cotton-master, Robert Owen in his New View of Society.

Secondly, Owen’s writings and speeches led to the formation of a movement, which at its height between 1839 and 1845 attracted tens of thousands, meeting on Sundays in ‘Halls of Science’, the Owenite secular alternative to the Christian Church. In place of sermons, paid socialist lecturers not only denounced the fallacies of Malthus, but more broadly, the defects of political economy, and its erroneous conceptions of human nature.

Thirdly, the Owenite critique of Malthus played a crucial part in the genesis of the Marxian critique of political economy. Among those regularly attending the Manchester Hall of Science between 1842 and 1844 was the young Friedrich Engels, a manager of his father’s textile firm and in his spare time, a Young Hegelian and radical journalist. Engels was an enthusiastic follower of its socialist lecturer, John Watts, whose Facts and Fictions of political economists led him to write his own Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, edited from Paris by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge in 1844. Like the Owenites, Engels focused heavily upon Malthus’s population theory, ‘this hideous blasphemy against nature and mankind’. Engels’s essay, in turn, led Marx to turn his attention to the Critique of Political Economy, which was to provide the sub-title of Capital, and was to preoccupy him for the next thirty years.

Read Gareth Stedman Jones’ full Historical Journal article for free here.

This article is part of the Historical Journal special issue Malthusian Moments.

Image credit:

Thomas Robert Malthus. Mezzotint by John Linnell, 1834. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Karl Marx. Wikimedia Commons