This book explores the lifelong dialogue between Thomas Robert Malthus and the libertarian anarchist William Godwin. Shedding light on important topics in the history of economic and political thought, it examines Godwin’s rejection of the new industrial order and his insights into a post-acquisitive, post-conflictual future. It shows that Malthus felt Godwin had neglected the ever-increasing pressure of population on scarce food and that control could not be superseded by automaticity so long as the productivity of the land was limited by the law of nature. Godwin and Malthus situated their views on population in the broader context of individual choice, property rights, normative constraint and the status of the poor. This book highlights Godwin and Malthus’ commitment to an economy that is equitable and efficient, making their ideas relevant to contemporary debates, and sheds light on two giant thinkers of the past.

This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.

This work traces the history of a debate which took place among the economists, political philosophers and writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, about whether the benefits of scientific progress would be nullified by the growth of the global population.

The first major study of population size and its tremendous importance to the character and quality of society, this classic examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources.

Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.

A biography of the early anarchist whose life and work was at the heart of British Radicalism.