ABSTRACT
Between Adam Smith and the second generation of British classical economics (Malthus, James Mill, Ricardo, Torrens and West) there is a gap of a good quarter-century. Although twenty-five years is a long period on most reckonings, this quarter-century may be said to be even longer, metaphorically speaking. The reason is that between Smith and his successors in political economy, there also took place that major event of the French Revolution (1789) and the French Revolutionary Wars it subsequently generated. Malthus’ Essay is in many respects a direct product of this world-shattering event, via some of the literature on human progress and equality the French Revolution had spawned. The full title of Malthus’ Essay, after all, is An Essay of the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society: With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet and other Writers. The view on progress of Godwin and Condorcet, both in a sense ‘children’ of the French Revolution, was the target of the young Malthus (he was thirty-two on its publication) acting here as political and moral philosopher as much as political economist. Godwin and Condorcet were not only ‘children’ of the French Revolution, caught up in some of the political and social whirlwind it had created. They were also children of the Enlightenment as the ‘age of reason’, imbued by its widespread spirit of progress.
Who were these two writers explicitly criticised by Malthus in his 1798 Essay, and what was the nature of their work? Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice, first published in 1793, can partly be seen as a response to Edmund Burke’s conservative attack on the democratic aspirations of the French Revolution, Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), joining the criticism thereof by Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (first published in 1791) and that by his de facto partner, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Godwin’s book, however, was more than that. It was a treatise of morals and happiness (its subtitle), of government and society (it is considered to be an early anarchist classic), of power and of property. It looked to the gradual perfectibility of man and to a growing equality in society, arguing that its
