IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-62113-0_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Of Population

In: William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus

Author

Listed:
  • David Reisman

    (University of Surrey)

Abstract

Godwin’s long book in 1820 reopened his dialogue with Malthus after a lapse of 20 years. While his reasons for returning to population are not clear, he may have been disappointed that the sections on his views had largely been replaced in Malthus’s 1817 Essay by a discussion of Robert Owen. In his new book, Godwin cites statistics from Sweden, America and England. He accuses Malthus of relying excessively on deduction. Godwin seeks to show that the population was stationary, agricultural productivity was rising, and unregulated automaticity was developing into propertyless, classless and stateless anarchy. Malthus, he said, had underestimated the evolutionary force of moral restraint on family size. Economic growth and private property automatically solves the problem of large families. Using the example of the hard-working Huguenots, he introduces quality along with quantity in a way that looks forward to eugenics.

Suggested Citation

  • David Reisman, 2024. "Of Population," Springer Books, in: William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus, chapter 0, pages 197-211, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-62113-0_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-62113-0_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-62113-0_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.