MALTHUS, Thomas Robert.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Principles of Political Economy considered with a view to their practical application. First edition, with the stamp on the title page of Carel Victor Gerritsen (1850-1905), the radical Dutch politican who founded the Nieuw-Malthusiaansche Bond (Neo-Malthusian League) in 1881; like Malthus Gerritsen deemed unchecked population growth the root of society's ills and proposed - unlike Malthus - the use of contraception to restrain it.Principles of Political Economy was conceived as a series of tracts rather than a comprehensive and systematic treatise. Malthus published it to establish his own position against that of Ricardo, with whom he had been having an ongoing debate about the nature of labour, demand and profit. Unlike Ricardo, Malthus supported the active encouragement of demand, and in so doing was seen by John Maynard Keynes as a forerunner of his own thought. "Malthus was proposing investment in public work and private luxury as a means of increasing effective demand, and hence as a palliative to economic distress. The nation, he thought, must balance the power to produce and the will to consume" (DSB). "The Principles had only a limited impact at the time, and was severely criticized by J. R. McCulloch and Ricardo; the latter prepared extensive critical notes. But more recently it has received greater recognition, largely as a result of the comments by J. M. Keynes in the 1930s. Keynes argued that Malthus's theory of effective demand provided a scientific explanation

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