Of Population

David Reisman ()
Additional contact information
David Reisman: University of Surrey

Chapter Chapter 10 in William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus, 2024, pp 197-211 from Springer

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Statistical evidence; Fertility; Agriculture; Selectivity; Moral restraint (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-62113-0_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031621130

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-62113-0_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().