I

The social question is the name that is given to the increasing preoccupation with the condition of the working classes over the course of the nineteenth century, which went hand in hand with anxieties about whether anything like the contemporary social, economic, and political order was sustainable over the long run. Under the capacious umbrella of the social question, one could discuss the mildest proposals for gradual reform, or apocalyptic scenarios of the destruction of the present order of things. On the level of political theory, it asked whether there could be a future for the property-based republican theories of the eighteenth century – including many of the radical arguments of the period of the French Revolution – in a world in which it seemed increasingly implausible to think that the great majority of the population might ever have substantial property of their own. To the extent to which one thought that those property-based republican theories could not cope with the new world that was coming into focus, the general idea, often enough, was that it was social and economic forces that were driving the transformation of the nineteenth century, and that politics would have to adjust itself to fit the new realities. What became known as Marxism is perhaps the most familiar example of this line of thinking, with its distinction between the social and economic ‘base’ and the political and ideological ‘superstructure’.Footnote ¹

The significance of Gareth Stedman Jones's 2004 book An end to poverty? is that he inserts the politics back into the origins of the social question. On his account, there was an exciting body of modern theory available in the 1790s that political reformers might employ for the purposes of fitting their societies for the world that was being reshaped by commerce and industry. Thinkers like the renegade Englishman Thomas Paine and the radical French aristocrat the marquis de Condorcet had spotted that the new political economy associated with Adam Smith's 1776 book, The wealth of nations, could be supplemented with the eighteenth-century actuarial science that had been developed out of the seventeenth-century mathematics of probability, in order to produce schemes for what we would now call social security. In particular, an emphasis fell on the provision of old age pensions, a significant social reform for a world in which most people fell into deep poverty as soon as they were no longer able to work for their living, and many died shortly afterwards.Footnote ²

On Stedman Jones's account, the blueprint for a plausible modern social democracy was available from the 1790s, but was swept away by the reactionary backlash that came in the wake of the French Revolution, a backlash in which Robert Malthus played a key role. The significance of Malthus – who explicitly targeted Condorcet in the first, 1798, edition of his Essay on the principle of population, alongside the English radical William Godwin, and who inserted passages critical of Paine in subsequent editionsFootnote ³ – is that, to borrow Larry Frohman's words, ‘both the sloth of the laboring classes (rather than their industry) and biology's tyranny over (enlightened) self-interest entered into an unholy alliance that overturned the belief in human perfectibility’ associated with his adversaries.Footnote ⁴ In the hands of Malthus, political economy was well on the way to becoming a truly dismal science.Footnote ⁵ Stedman Jones's political ambition in his book is to clear a space for the recovery of the radical social democracy of Condorcet and Paine, and to commend them as a model for politics to our own age.

This article calls into question an aspect of the grand narrative with which Stedman Jones is working. Although it is not a straightforward instantiation of the Whig interpretation of history – that is to say, of history as a narrative of progress culminating in the presentFootnote ⁶ – since it concerns itself above all with a road not taken, Stedman Jones's narrative is, like Whig narratives, very much one of – crudely – heroes and villains. Here, I complicate Malthus's identification as a villain, with particular reference to the shadow of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been dead twenty years by the time the Essay on the principle of population first appeared, a shadow which hangs over the entire debate between Malthus and those he was criticizing. When we put Rousseau back into the picture, we get a strikingly coherent story about the theoretical origins of the social question, such that to a very considerable extent some of these debates of the early nineteenth century come to look like not much more than a set of variations on a Rousseauist theme, or a teasing-out of ideas that Rousseau had first articulated in, especially, the mid-1750s.

The Essay on population is often presented in the scholarly literature as an argument against the followers of Rousseau. ‘The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend’ is how the Preface to the 1798 edition begins, and that friend was identified as Malthus's father Daniel by William Otter in his posthumous memoir that was printed as part of the second edition of the son's Principles of political economy.Footnote ⁷ Daniel Malthus was one of the most enthusiastic British Rousseauists. Indeed, after David Hume managed to bring Rousseau to England in 1766 – and exactly a week after Rousseau had sat for his famous portrait by Allan RamsayFootnote ⁸ – the pair visited Daniel Malthus's house in Surrey in early March, when young Robert was only a baby.Footnote ⁹ (John Maynard Keynes was the first to call Hume and Rousseau his ‘fairy godmothers’, and the label has stuck.Footnote ¹⁰) Daniel was disappointed that he could not induce Rousseau to stay the night, but he remained loyal, later visiting him during his sojourn in Derbyshire and corresponding with him following his return from England to France, when he was supplying him with books to fuel a growing interest in botany.Footnote ¹¹

Although Bishop Otter's testimony was recorded over three decades after the event it describes, it is usually considered reliable, perhaps on account of his personal acquaintance with the family: his daughter Sophia married Robert's son Henry. But even if we discount it somewhat, the next most plausible candidate to be cast in the role of Robert's conversational sparring partner is probably his cousin Jane Dalton. Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin have recently written that, ‘since the famous conversation that sparked the Essay would take place at Albury, Surrey, where Dalton lived, it is possible that she was a participant’. She had lived in Paris before the Revolution, was (in Bashford and Chaplin's words) ‘as familiar as anyone in the household with French intellectual trends’, and was also (in Patricia James's words) ‘devoted to Rousseau’.Footnote ¹² And if the Essay originated in a disagreement that Robert Malthus had with at least one member of his family, that work also presented itself as an argument with the marquis de Condorcet and with William Godwin, who, as Donald Winch has remarked, can both ‘be described as Rousseauistes’, each attributing ‘the evils of the human condition to corrupt political and economic institutions’ and building on ‘Rousseau's idea of man's capacity to perfect himself’.Footnote ¹³

Rather than seeing the Essay as Malthus against the Rousseauists, or employing other familiar frameworks, such as Reaction versus the Revolution, or pessimism versus optimism, or dystopia versus Enlightenment, or perhaps the slightly less familiar one of casting the issue in terms of Mr Forester versus Mr Fax (two characters from Thomas Love Peacock's 1817 novel Melincourt whose ideas remind the reader of Malthus and Rousseau respectively),Footnote ¹⁴ this article presents Malthus's arguments as part of what we might call a family quarrel among some of Rousseau's theoretical descendants, and tries to bring into view the plausibly Rousseauist aspect of what he was doing.Footnote ¹⁵ So it is worth beginning by underscoring just how unobvious it is that Malthus is any kind of Rousseauist. The crudest version of the Malthusian argument is well known: that population tends to rise geometrically, while food production tends only to rise arithmetically, so that, with the passage of time, starvation and misery are unavoidable.Footnote ¹⁶ Put like that, it looks as if Malthus is the antithesis of Rousseau, who was worried – as were various other contemporary observersFootnote ¹⁷ – about the social and political consequences of the crisis of rural depopulation in the France of his time, and who held that, ‘All other things equal, the Government under which the Citizens, without resort to external means, without naturalizations, without colonies, populate and multiply most is without fail the best.’Footnote ¹⁸

Was Malthus thinking about Rousseau? He is certainly not mentioned in the text of the first edition of the Essay on the principle of population. It is not at all eccentric, however, to speculate that Malthus was familiar with Rousseau's theoretical argument. Consider: Godwin's Enquiry concerning political justice, against which he was writing, explicitly discusses some of Rousseau's positions,Footnote ¹⁹ and his father, who took a keen interest in his education, was well known for his devotion to Rousseau. We know Robert was an adult living at home – with access, one can surmise, to Daniel's booksFootnote ²⁰ – at the time the Essay was conceived in familial disagreement. And given Daniel's enthusiasm, the temptation must have been strong to confront his sympathies for the ‘progressive’ or perfectibilist Enlightenment arguments of Condorcet and Godwin with more pessimistic strands of argument that could be spun out of the most authoritative source Robert had to hand – the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nor should it be puzzling that Rousseau's influence might go unacknowledged in Malthus's text: an appropriation of Rousseau formed a part of the broader discourse of English Jacobinism, and it would have been awkward to cite him favourably in what was obviously an anti-Jacobin tract.Footnote ²¹ But what was it, then, that Rousseau had argued that might be relevant to what Robert Malthus had to say?

The Discourse on the origin of inequality is probably best known today for Rousseau's account of the state of nature, an account which has long been associated, and only somewhat misleadingly, with the phrase, ‘the noble savage’ (though the phrase itself is not Rousseau's, but Charles Dickens's),Footnote ²² and which has persistently been understood as offering a radical alternative to Thomas Hobbes's depiction of the natural state of humankind in the famous thirteenth chapter of his Leviathan.Footnote ²³ Denis Diderot crisply articulated this view in his article for the Encyclopédie on ‘Hobbism’.

Considered this way, then, Malthus seems to fall squarely on the Hobbesian side of the divide. The Malthusian image was dire, write Bashford and Chaplin, ‘meant to dampen any reader's enthusiasm over the potential nobility of savagery or the lingering hope of finding a paradise among America's original inhabitants’.Footnote ²⁵ And yet, if we query the way the Hobbes–Rousseau opposition is constructed like this, a different perspective emerges in which Malthus seems to be taking the side of both Hobbes and Rousseau, against their very numerous critics.

If we scratch away at the oppositions Diderot constructs, for example, they can be made to appear overdrawn. It is true that Hobbes asserts, and that Rousseau denies, that the state of nature is a state of war. But the difference obtains in virtue of the ways in which they define the relevant keyword. For Hobbes ‘warre, consisteth … in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known’, and so even if there is no actual fighting in a state of nature, a state of war obtains.Footnote ²⁶ For Rousseau, by contrast, war is ‘not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another’, and so a state of nature cannot be a state of war, even if there is fighting all the time.Footnote ²⁷ Hobbes may very well have envisaged more violence in a pure state of nature than Rousseau did, but Rousseau's state of nature was certainly not free of violence, as his fragment on ‘The state of war’ makes clear when he considers how ‘there may be fights and murders, but never or very rarely extended enmities and wars’.Footnote ²⁸

Diderot was looking to sharpen the differences between Hobbes and Rousseau, but to other eighteenth-century eyes, they looked like partners in crime – specifically, the crime of denying the natural sociability of humankind. Both were explicit about this, Hobbes when he notoriously asserted that life in the state of nature was ‘solitary’, as well as ‘poore, nasty, brutish and short’,Footnote ²⁹ and Rousseau when he claimed that he could derive all the rules of natural right ‘from the cooperation and from the combination our mind is capable of making’ between the two principles of pity and the kind of self-love he called amour de soi-même, ‘without it being necessary to introduce into it that of sociability’.Footnote ³⁰ With natural sociability and its attendant notions such as natural law and natural rights doing less work in explaining how human communities could operate on a large scale and in a lasting manner in this Hobbist and Rousseauist optic, the artificial elements of human affairs – such as politics – correspondingly had to do more of the heavy lifting.

II

Malthus, then, follows in this tradition of Hobbist Rousseauism. Rousseau made sceptical remarks about the men he called the ‘jurisconsults’,Footnote ³¹ and when Malthus took aim at William Godwin and Tom Paine, his charge was that they were allowing natural sociability to do more work in their political thinking than he was willing to allow. As Malthus wrote about Godwin in the first edition of the Essay on population, the ‘great error under which Mr Godwin labours throughout his whole work is the attributing almost all the vices and misery that are seen in civil society to human institutions’, with ‘[p]olitical regulations and the established administration of property’ the ‘fruitful sources of all evil’.Footnote ³² And for Paine, following in the natural law tradition of John Locke that looked back to Psalms 115:16,Footnote ³³ God had given the earth to all men in common, and the point of his social security scheme was that those who had usurped this common inheritance of mankind by enclosing the land should pay compensation to those who had been deprived of their birthright, so that they were not thereby disadvantaged.Footnote ³⁴ Malthus was himself a sceptic with regard to how much political reform could reasonably be thought to achieve – the passage about Godwin above continues with its claim that human institutions are ‘mere feathers that float on the surface, in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life’, after allFootnote ³⁵ – but there was much more to political management than seeking to correct the distortions to natural society that bad politics had introduced; and it was naïve to think that the progress of human perfectibility over time would work to make the problems of politics less intractable.

There are at least four further respects in which the argument of the first edition of the Essay on population has a distinctively Rousseauist aspect, with particular reference to the argument of the Discourse on inequality. One – which I shall merely note here, rather than discuss in any detail, as it is extensively treated in the scholarly literature – is the way in which both writers have been plausibly interpreted as offering heterodox theodicies, explaining the prevalence of evil in the world not with respect to an original depravity in humankind, but rather in terms of the unintended consequences of a certain pattern of human development.Footnote ³⁶

The second is to note that in decisive contrast to Adam Smith and his followers, who emphasized the power of the natural urge to better their condition, Malthus agreed with Rousseau that the natural state of the savage human being was one of torpor from which they had to be roused, he thought, by ‘the cravings of hunger or the pinchings of cold’.Footnote ³⁷ This idea that the stimulus to activity was extrinsic also relates to their shared thought that demographic pressures were critical in the story of human development, illustrated by Malthus's remark that ‘Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state’, or Rousseau's claim that ‘[i]n proportion as Mankind spread, difficulties multiplied together with men’.Footnote ³⁸ The third and the fourth parallels require more extended discussion.

The third kind of parallel concerns the kind of conjectural reasoning they deployed. Rousseau and Malthus each provided at the heart of their polemic a model to illustrate how the happiest state of human society would become miserable. Intriguingly, both writers might plausibly be thought to be starting with something that they find in Archbishop Fénelon's Telemachus.Footnote ³⁹ Rousseau considered that human beings were happiest at an early stage of social development, in various respects like the one Fénelon describes in Bétique, where there is only a simple (largely gendered) division of labour, and no foreign commerce,Footnote ⁴⁰ and he explained how the distinctive kind of self-love he called amour-propre would develop in such a way so as to poison their happiness, creating the conditions for the conflict between the rich and the poor and other varieties of social inequality and domination.

Bétique is not, however, the only attractive sketch of social relations that Fénelon provided, and towards the end of Telemachus we are presented with a vision of the agrarian society that is created after Mentor (the goddess Minerva in disguise) reforms corrupt Salente (a city in the heel of the Italian boot), by resettling much of the urban population in the countryside and refocusing economic life on agricultural production. Such a society was strongly reminiscent of the utopian thought experiment Malthus asked us to engage in as part of his refutation of Godwin in chapter 10 of the Essay, in which ‘[u]nwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist’, ‘[c]rowds no longer collect together in great and pestilent cities for purposes of court intrigue, of commerce, and vicious gratifications’, ‘[s]imple, healthy, and rational amusements take place of drinking, gaming, and debauchery’, and the ‘greater part of the happy inhabitants of this terrestrial paradise live in hamlets and farmhouses scattered over the face of the country’.Footnote ⁴¹ Both Fénelon and Malthus agreed that such a society would have a high rate of population growth; but whereas Fénelon imagined further land being brought under cultivation to accommodate such growth, Malthus asked us to consider what happens when the population doubled every twenty-five years, and there was no more ‘fresh land to turn up’ – with the necessary shift to a more vegetable diet under pressure of population also resulting in insufficient quantities of manure for the soil. Godwin's virtuous utopia, in short, would turn to hell.

The emphases of their arguments were a bit different – Malthus laid the stress on biological factors more than Rousseau, Rousseau emphasized psychological and social factors more than Malthus. A. M. C. Waterman's analysis of their arguments operates with a contrast between Rousseau's ‘moral evil’ and Malthus's ‘natural evil’, where the former is derivative from human choice;Footnote ⁴³ though we might reflect that the voluntaristic elements of the narrative of the second part of the Discourse on inequality are not especially pronounced. The rhetoric of the famous opening passage, where Rousseau described the very first enclosure of land, suggests an alternative pathway for the history of the species, had a particular decision gone the other way. But Rousseau's point in what follows was to show that the invention of property was but one moment in a much longer developmental sequence, such that by the time the enclosure of agricultural land begins, it was already overdetermined.

The fourth kind of parallel concerns political economy, with both Rousseau and Malthus developing arguments about how in modern commercial society economic distress in the countryside fed through to the world of impoverished, insecure, and unemployed labour in the towns.Footnote ⁴⁴ Montesquieu had argued that the kind of large inegalitarian regime he described in his theory of monarchy, built around unequal property holdings and an economy oriented towards the luxury sector – with ever-changing fashions stimulating high levels of consumer demand – could be a stable, prosperous modern regime, providing civil liberty and the rule of law to its subjects.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rousseau argued in the Discourse on inequality that such a regime could not possibly be stabilized, but was bound ultimately to collapse. A modern monarchy's military defence was provided by a standing army, and standing armies were expensive to maintain, leading to the imposition of heavy taxation on the bulk of the population, the agricultural class. This in turn generated two different but equally catastrophic scenarios. In Note IX, on luxury, the ‘scorned farmer … abandons his fields to go look in the Cities for the bread he should be taking from them’, only to join the throng of ‘Citizens turned beggars or thieves and destined someday to end their misery on the wheel or a dunghill’, and the ‘weak and depopulated’ state ‘end[s] up by being the prey of the poor Nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the alternative scenario, outlined in the closing passage of the Discourse, high taxes prompted ‘the discouraged Cultivator to leave his field even in Peacetime, and abandon his plow to gird on the sword’, but the army would turn out to be not ‘the defenders of the Fatherland’ but rather a vehicle for the Caesarist ambitions of ‘their Country's oppressor’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Turning to Malthus, we repeatedly find the themes of Rousseau's presentation redeployed. These themes are not unique to Rousseau, of course. The concern with rural depopulation, especially but not only in France, was shared far more broadly, and given its most eloquent poetic expression in Oliver Goldsmith's 1770 poem, The deserted village. In a 1753 work by C.-J. Herbert – so nearly contemporary with the Discourse on inequality – we find a broadly similar contrast of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, in which the wealth produced by the latter is ‘subject to the vicissitudes of war and changing times and to the caprices of fashion, and therefore are not durable, as is agriculture’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In light of Malthus's general preference for agriculture, it is sometimes remarked that he can sound quite a lot like a Physiocrat.Footnote ⁴⁹ But the most detailed investigation of the question of whether Malthus was familiar with the works of the Physiocrats – beyond the second-hand acquaintance he had through Adam Smith's discussions in The wealth of nations – has failed to turn up any evidence relating to the period relevant to the composition of the first edition of the Essay.Footnote ⁵⁰ The echoes of Rousseau, however, are quite pronounced.

Consider, for example, the argument Malthus prosecutes against Adam Smith about English economic development towards the end of the 1798 Essay. Stedman Jones deploys this passage to illustrate a contrast. Smith was an ‘an unqualified supporter of high wages’, he writes, but here Malthus ‘chided him for confusing “the happiness of nations” with “the happiness and comfort of the lower orders of society which is the most numerous class in every nation”’.Footnote ⁵¹ But Malthus's criticism here is not that the welfare of the labouring poor is being prioritized by Smith more than it ought to be, but rather the reverse. What Malthus was asking was whether Smith ‘has not stopped to take notice of those instances, where the wealth of a society may increase (according to his definition of wealth) without having any tendency to increase the comforts of the labouring part of it’.Footnote ⁵² If ‘a nation, for a course of years, was to add what it saved from its yearly revenue, to its manufacturing capital solely’,Footnote ⁵³ then, although wages would rise with the demand for labour, so too would the price of food, such that working-class living standards would remain the same.Footnote ⁵⁴ With the demand for labour rising in the manufacturing sector, there would also be a migration from countryside to town, an ‘exchange of professions’ which would be ‘very unfavourable in respect of health, one essential ingredient of happiness, besides the greater uncertainty of manufacturing labour, arising from the capricious taste of man, the accidents of war, and other causes’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The details of the argument were not the same, to be sure – the imbalance in Rousseau's two-sector economy was due to increases in taxation, in Malthus's to a skewed pattern of growth – but the process set in motion, of migration from the countryside to the town leading to the diminished happiness of the urban population working precariously in an economy marked by fashionable luxury and war, was very much in the tradition of Rousseau's argument about the trajectory of the modern state in the Discourse on inequality.

How, then, might the living standards of the labouring classes rise? The first edition of the Essay on population was not optimistic. Balanced growth across both manufacturing and agricultural sectors could raise them over the medium term. But that could not be a longer-term solution if in the end they would be pegged back by rising population, and the pressures this would place on both wages and food. Neither did Condorcet's social security scheme offer a satisfactory alternative, for if ‘a class of people which maintains itself entirely by industry is necessary to every state’, then the ‘labour necessary to procure subsistence for an extended population will not be performed without the goad of necessity’. But social security threatened to reduce this ‘spur to industry’, Malthus alleged.

Malthus may not have been a republican in anything like the manner of Rousseau, but as a Foxite Whig he was willing to make arguments about ‘the true principles of liberty and equality’, which were (and are) the quintessential republican political values.

The Essay on the principle of population was very substantially rewritten for the second edition of 1803, when Malthus lifted the veil of anonymity and put his own name on the title page. In one significant respect, that second edition was less Rousseauist than the first. ‘Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question’, Rousseau had declared at the start of the Discourse on inequality,Footnote ⁵⁷ but for Malthus's second edition, there was much less by way of conjectural reasoning, and a lot more empirical data. Yet in this and subsequent editions Malthus was willing to offer a more positive vision of the future, exploring what the alternative checks to population might be, besides misery and vice – where ‘misery’ chiefly meant starvation and disease, and ‘vice’ included ‘[p]romiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and improper arts to conceal the consequences of irregular connexions’Footnote ⁵⁸ – and the ‘prudential restraint’ that he theorized had a conspicuously Rousseauist dimension.

The most plausible long-term answer to reining in the growth of population lay in delaying marriage. The ideal was what he called ‘moral restraint’, or celibacy before (delayed) marriage.Footnote ⁵⁹ But – as if following Rousseau's insistence on ‘taking men as they are’Footnote ⁶⁰ – Malthus recognized this to be an implausible aspiration; and he certainly did not share Godwin's view (or indeed that of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft) that a healthy future was one in which people had a lot less sex than they typically had in the eighteenth century, and that a diminishing human interest in sex was part and parcel of the ongoing process of social development.Footnote ⁶¹ Malthus had ridiculed this belief in the first edition of the Essay, remarking that although he ‘cannot properly contradict’ a writer who told him that ‘he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich’, that writer would do better in persuading ‘any reasonable person’ if he could at least show ‘that the necks of mankind have been gradually elongating, that the lips have grown harder and more prominent, that the legs and feet are daily altering their shape, and that the hair is beginning to change into stubs of feathers’.Footnote ⁶² But if moral restraint might prove to be implausible, ‘prudential restraint’ – or delayed marriage in the absence of pre-marital celibacy – was not nearly so chimerical.

Human beings needed to practise a certain kind of (non-moral, non-Christian) virtue if they were to be able to flourish in the future, but just how they were to do that on Malthus's account that was not always entirely clear. One mechanism, however, lay in the cultivation of what he called ‘decent pride’ – something he thought in particular was missing amongst the Irish poor.Footnote ⁶³

In the third edition of 1806, a line about ‘the effect of a good government in increasing the prudential habits and personal respectability of the lower classes of society’ was added, with the qualification that ‘certainly this effect will always be incomplete without a good system of education’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Niall O'Flaherty's gloss, decent pride was ‘the elevated sense of self-worth that came with enjoying comfortable economic circumstances, arising in large part, we may assume, from a feeling of being esteemed by one's neighbours’.Footnote ⁶⁶

A ‘system of general education’ obviously echoed the proposals for public education in Book v of The wealth of nations, and, as O'Flaherty has written, an education that helped to inculcate ‘habits of sobriety, industry, independence, and prudence’ (Malthus's words) would ‘nurture those attitudes and values that raised the standard of living below which the labourer would be unwilling to sink for the sake of having a family’ (O'Flaherty's).Footnote ⁶⁷ The concern with a certain cultural minimum also calls to mind Smith's remark about how ‘a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct’.Footnote ⁶⁸ So there was something obviously Smithian about this line of reasoning.

We should not, however, lose sight of its Rousseauist resonances. It is easy to miss these, insofar as the very phrase ‘decent pride’ was earlier deployed specifically as part of one of Edmund Burke's attacks on Rousseau. In A letter to a member of the National Assembly in 1791, he had written that ‘[w]hen the fence from the gallantry of preceptors is broken down, and your families are no longer protected by decent pride and salutary domestic prejudice, there is but one step to a frightful corruption’. The National Assembly, Burke charged, was keen that ‘the females of the first families in France may become an easy prey to dancing-masters, fiddlers, pattern-drawers, friseurs, and valets-de-chambre’.

III

Burke's entertaining anathemas, however, ought not obscure our view of how an argument about prudential restraint and decent pride is entirely consonant with the central thrust of Rousseau's argument. In the absence of a robust natural sociability, Rousseau contended, self-interest was a sufficiently powerful force that it was implausible to think that it could be transcended, such that a real altruism – or Malthusian ‘moral restraint’ – might take its place. Rather, the general good had to be constructed on the foundations of individual good, and individuals shaped in such a way that their pursuit of what was good for them would realize a genuinely common good, by contributing to the reproduction of the conditions that allowed for the maintenance of freedom and equality under the rule of law. What that meant, often enough, was that citizens had to learn how to restrain the immediate inclinations of self-love, such that both they and their fellow citizens would benefit in consequence. Malthusian prudential restraint has just this structure, and his ‘decent pride’ maps very neatly onto what Nicholas Dent has called ‘uninflamed amour-propre’ in Rousseau, or the healthy variety of self-love which characterizes a society where the rivalries between people find expression as a virtuous spiral of emulation that consolidates mutual recognition, and works continually to raise the level of the threshold for decent pride, rather than as a vicious circle of jealous competition. Public education, furthermore, is an entirely appropriate Rousseauist tool to employ for this purpose.

Where Malthus's perspective departed strikingly from Rousseau's concerned his view about the appropriate size of agricultural holdings. Even if the English model was not perfect, he thought there were political dangers with tinkering with it. What was wanted, he argued in the Principles of political economy, were medium-sized farms, which generated sufficient profit such that farmers had access to sufficient capital for investing in improving the land. Too many seriously rich landlords, and their spending on ‘menial servants’ and ‘territorial influence’ would check ‘effectual demand’. Too many small proprietors, and ‘all great improvements on the land, all great enterprizes in commerce and manufactures, and most of the wonders described by Adam Smith, as resulting from the division of labour, would be at an end’.Footnote ⁷⁰ But although this began as an economic worry – and one that pulled in a broadly anti-Rousseauist direction, for Rousseau always defended small-scale agriculture – Malthus then presented his political anxiety, which takes us right back onto the terrain of the Discourse on inequality again, about how economic dynamics would come to threaten the stability of the political regime. The ‘fearful experiment’ of ‘a great sub-division of property’ was now underway in France, he wrote, where the ‘law of succession’ required the equal division of property ‘among all the children without distinction of age or sex’.Footnote ⁷¹ The worry was that ‘the country, at the end of a century, will be quite as remarkable for its extraordinary poverty and distress, as for its unusual equality of property’,Footnote ⁷² and that ‘in this state of things, with little or none of the natural influence of property to check at once the power of the crown and the violence of the people, it is not possible to conceive that such a mixed government as France has now established can be maintained’.Footnote ⁷³ Agricultural small-holdings might provide a stable foundation for a small republic, but not for one established on a national scale. For both Rousseau and Malthus, then, the danger continued to be that economic distress originating in the countryside would lead to dictatorship. In Malthus's words, ‘the state of property above described would be the very soil for a military despotism’,Footnote ⁷⁴ and his advice to the English was that with these concerns in mind they would do better not to abolish the law of primogeniture.Footnote ⁷⁵

My own view is that Malthus was a careful reader of Rousseau's Discourse on inequality, and that the fruit of that reading shows in the distinctive lines of his thinking outlined above. The evidence I have presented, however, is more suggestive than it is ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, it is the kind of argument that invites the old objection to ‘influence studies’,Footnote ⁷⁷ recently satirized as one of ‘All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets’, that ‘[t]his famous thing closely resembles, and therefore responds to, that slightly earlier, less famous thing’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Perhaps Rousseau was not nearly as significant as has been insinuated here, and that Malthus was drawing on and responding to a much broader range of texts, from the French Physiocrats to the English Whigs. Perhaps so. But even if I am wrong about the role that reading and reflecting on the Discourse on inequality played in the fashioning of core Malthusian arguments, both in 1798 and subsequently, the argument presented here usefully reminds us that the Essay on population is broadly continuous with an important family of eighteenth-century arguments. When we treat the social question as a nineteenth-century question, or even when we locate its origins in the post-Revolutionary political controversies of the 1790s, we lose sight of the way in which what was being discussed were recognizable variations on mid-eighteenth-century themes. The older argument was one about the practical difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of maintaining constitutional government and the rule of law in the context of the social – including demographic – pathologies generated by unbalanced growth across the rural and urban sectors; and, as we have seen, its major elements show up in various places across Malthus's major published works.

Keith Tribe has recently observed that although the British political economists of the early nineteenth century such as Malthus, James Mill, and David Ricardo presented themselves as ‘the heirs of Adam Smith’, they had in fact merely ‘used some of his economic categories to construct a restricted model of economic relationships which entirely wrote out of the plot any sense that an economic order presupposes a moral order, and hence requires or presupposes a plausible account of human sociability’. This was a fateful development, insofar as ‘their work was seized on by a young Karl Marx and rewritten as a critique of contemporary society that, for a variety of contingent reasons, survived into the late twentieth century as the core of an economic critique of modernity’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But on the account presented here, Malthus's anthropology owed far more to an Enlightenment science of society than it did to the distinctive nineteenth-century caricature of homo economicus;Footnote ⁸⁰ and it was David Ricardo who signalled his own distance from that eighteenth-century tradition when he reviewed Malthus's gloomy forecast of French political development in the nineteenth century and wrote in the margins of his copy of the Principles that ‘I cannot participate with Mr. Malthus in his fears for the duration of a free Government, under such a system.’Footnote ⁸¹