ABSTRACT
Throughout the learned world there is currently a revival of interest in Malthus. This revival does not turn on precisely the same kind of issue that concerned him—the question of the perfectibility of mankind. Since Malthus devoted much attention to the checks to population, and since among these checks he gave prominence to the lack of subsistence, it is natural that people look to him for a possible explanation of what may actually stop the present unequal trend. It is precisely the question of logical adequacy and empirical validity that the authors wish to explore in Malthus' theory. First, however, they characterize the state of population thought prior to Malthus and then discuss him briefly as a man and as a figure in intellectual history. His deductive propositions suffer from lack of logical development and confusion with empirical propositions, and are therefore less serviceable. Malthus's inductive proposition are confused, inconsistent, contain ambiguous terms and lack of proof.
