An Essay on the Principle of Population;

£5,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

in essence a 'new work' The second edition, substantially revised and in essence a 'new work' in which Malthus defends his views against a host of critics (Preface). 'The central idea of the essay — and the hub of Malthusian theory — was a simple one. The population of a community, Malthus, suggested, increases geometrically, while food supplies increased only arithmetically. If the natural increase in population occurs, the food supply becomes insufficient and the size of the population is checked by 'misery' — that is, the poorest sections of the community suffer disease and famine. The Essay was highly influential in the progress of thought in early nineteenth-century Europe' (PMM). In this enlarged edition, Malthus made clear what was only implicit in the first, that prudential restraint should, if humanly possible, be 'moral restraint' — that is, delayed marriage accompanied by strictly moral pre-marital behaviour, although he admitted that moral restraint would not be easy and that there would be occasional failures. Whereas in the first edition he had said that all the checks to population would involve either misery or vice, in the second edition he attempted to lighten this 'melancholy hue' (first edition, p.iv) and 'to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay' (second edition, p.vii) by arguing that moral restraint, if supported by an education emphasising the immorality of bringing children into the world without the means of supporting them, woul

• Binding: Hardcover

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