ABSTRACT
As a result of Sumner’s Treatise (1816), Malthusian political economy was able to retain the anti-utopian aspect of Malthus’s original polemic against Godwin whilst replacing its amateurish theology with a more acceptable theodicy. What had appeared to Malthus as a nasty case of the Problem of Evil was shown by Sumner to be an example of the Argument from Design, so successfully developed by Paley in his Natural Theology (1825 [1802]). This, in turn, enabled Sumner to reintroduce the orthodox, Butlerian doctrine of human life on earth as a ‘state of discipline and trial’ that Malthus had denied in 1798. Malthus himself had strengthened the argument for private property in 1803 by appropriating Paley’s concept of ‘moral restraint’ – which also afforded a legitimate escape from ‘misery or vice’. And ‘moral restraint’, which must be taught and learned, required that attention to institutional reform which all Whigs took for granted and which ‘liberal Tories’ were beginning to tolerate. All of these improvements were incorporated in the 1817 recension of the Essay (Waterman 1991b: 160-76).
