Abstract
In the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus, an English political economist, advanced a theory of crisis in his Essay on the Principle of Population,1 based on a posited relation of disproportion between the rate of demographic growth and the rate of growth of food supply. According to this thesis, population naturally increases in geometric ratio but the means of subsistence, or agricultural production increases only in an arithmetic ratio making it impossible for agricultural production to sustain growing populations indefinitely. These two opposing natural tendencies generate periodic crises of food supply corrected by reduction of population size. Malthus describes two distinct forms of checks on population size: ‘positive’ checks such as war, epidemics, famine, and ‘preventive’ checks such as various forms of birth control, including abortion, and infanticide. Since food scarcity, however, is the condition for the operation of these checks, it is the ultimate check on population increase.
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1 Neo-Malthusian Theory
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Societies, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorat, and other writers, 1798 edition (reprints of Economic Classics, N.Y., 1965).
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness with an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evil which it Occasions, 1801 edition (Richard D. Irwing, Homewood, Illinois, 1963).
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine, N.Y., 1968);
Anne H. Ehrlich, Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology, 2nd Edition (W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1972);
Dennis Pirages, ARK II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives (W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1974).
Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Science, Vol. 162, Dec. 1968, pp. 1243–8;
Georg Borgstrom, The Hungry Planet (Collier-Macmillan Ltd., London, 1965);
Antony J. Dolman (ed.), RIO, Reshaping the International Order (The New American Library, Inc., N.Y., 1977);
Ervin Laszlo et al., Goals for Mankind (E.P. Dutton, N.Y., 1977);
James W. Botkin et al., No Limits to Learning (Pergamon Press, N.Y., 1979);
Thierry de Montbrial, Energy: The Countdown (Pergamon Press, N.Y., 1979);
Orio Giarini, Dialogue on Wealth and Welfare (Pergamon Press, N.Y., 1980).
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique’, in Theory and Practice (Heinemann, London, 1974), pp. 195–252;
Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (The Seabury Press, N.Y., 1974);
Roberto Miguelez, Science, Valeurs et Rationalité (Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa, 1984).
Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (The New American Library Inc., N.Y., 1972).
The model is that of J.W. Forrester posed in Industrial Dynamics (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961).
This study is based on World demographic estimates for the last 3 centuries, for example, drawn from A.M. Curr-Saunders, World Population: Past Growth and Present Trends (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1936);
Donald Bogue, Principles of Demography (John Wiley and Sons, N.Y., 1969);
William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State (W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977).
See, in particular, C.B. Macpherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962).
Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Science, Vol. 162, Dec. 1968, pp. 1243–8.
J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster, Philadelphia, 1966).
See, for example, Paul Q. Hirst, ‘Economic Classes and Politics’ in A. Hunt (ed.), Class and Class Structure (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1977);
Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (New Left Books, London, 1973).
Kenneth Boulding, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ in Toward a Steady-State Economy, Herman Daly (ed.), (W.H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1973), pp. 121–32.
Ratko Milisavljevic, Environment, idéologie et science (Editions anthropos, Paris, 1978).
Lester Brown, World without Borders (Random House, 1972), p. 351.
Harold and Margaret Sprout, Towards a Politics of the Planet Earth (Nostrand Rinehold Co., N.Y., 1971), p. 476.
Aurelio Peccei, One Hundred Pages for the Future, Reflections of the President of the Club of Rome (Pergamon Press, N.Y., 1981), pp. 110–11.
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© 1988 Koula Mellos
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Mellos, K. (1988). Neo-Malthusian Theory. In: Perspectives on Ecology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19598-5_2
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