Malthus wrote in response to the utopian writings of William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet — two men deeply influenced by the French Revolution. Godwin was a political philosopher and journalist who believed that evil was rooted in ignorance and could be ameliorated by education. Condorcet, a philosopher and mathematician, also advanced radical positions, advocating for the equality of women and the abolition of slavery.
Both Godwin and Condorcet argued that society’s afflictions were caused by human-made institutions that could be reconstructed by people to produce greater flourishing.
But Malthus thought they failed to take into account what he saw as unalterable realities of human nature and human biology. He believed that the future prosperity they envisioned would lead to younger marriages and more births, thus increasing the size of the population beyond the capacity of agriculture and Earth to sustain it. Population growth would lead to misery caused by war, disease and famine. But, rather than decrying these, Malthus thought they would provide the “positive checks” necessary to keep the human population within bounds.
Malthus also saw danger in what he believed was a too-generous provision of charitable relief, as this would also stimulate burdensome surplus births. Instead, a bare minimum of relief to avert actual death must conform to the principle of “less eligibility”; that is, any relief provided to the able-bodied must be “less eligible,” or less desirable than the lowest standard of living of waged workers to prod the poor into work.
These ideas became central to the 1834 Poor Law in England that required recipients of relief to be entirely destitute. They had to be willing to conform to the requirement of entering a workhouse, where they would be housed and fed — but then required to work in a prisonlike setting. As Charles Dickens put it in his critique of the workhouse in the second chapter of “Oliver Twist,” “… they established the rule that all poor people should have the alternative … of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.” And when Oliver, in a scene made iconic by the film versions of the story, had the nerve to ask for more than the standard portion of gruel, he was thrown out of the workhouse.
William Hazlitt, a pioneer in engaged essay writing, mounted the most sustained and thoroughgoing attack on Malthus’s ideas in a series of polemics over two decades from 1807 to 1826. Where Malthus saw impoverishing shortages as the consequence of inexorable, impersonal forces, Hazlitt saw shortages created by the monopolies enjoyed by the rich. Rather than accept poverty as inevitable and essential to limit reproduction, as did Malthus, Hazlitt praised Condorcet’s idea for a fund drawing upon contributions from all that could be used to alleviate the hardships of unemployment, old age or widowhood — a conceptual forerunner to Social Security. Hazlitt underlined how Malthus privileged the property rights of the rich over the human rights of the poor by likening new generations of the poor to guests at a dinner party where all the places at the table were already taken.
Perhaps most relevant today, Hazlitt also expressed shock at how Malthus seemed to relish the catastrophes he described, as if the punishments exacted by famine and war became goods in themselves. The undeserving victims thus became objects of revulsion rather than fellow human beings deserving of our sympathy.