IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-62113-0_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Justice and Population

In: William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus

Author

Listed:
  • David Reisman

    (University of Surrey)

Abstract

Godwin and Malthus were not the first in the field. This chapter shows that both borrowed extensively from a literature extending back to the Bible, Plato and Aristotle. The authorities on whom they most frequently drew were Petty, Cantillon, Davenant, Malynes, Franklin, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, Wallace and Paley. Since they were writing in advance of the first census, they had to rely on the imperfect data of authors like Price and Howlett. This chapter traces out the influence. It establishes the nature of Godwin’s contribution to the theory of underpopulation, overpopulation, agricultural improvement and the subsistence wage. Godwin did not think numbers were excessive. He also believed that marriage would decline in favour of promiscuity which in his opinion led to fewer births. Public opinion would be strong enough to keep the numbers down. If population exceeds resources, the rich should volunteer to share their endowment with the poor. Malthus on population is discussed in Chaps. 8 and 11 .

Suggested Citation

  • David Reisman, 2024. "Justice and Population," Springer Books, in: William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus, chapter 0, pages 119-135, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-62113-0_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-62113-0_6
    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_6. 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.