Malthus and his contemporaries on ‘Commercial Society’

Abstract

This article on British economic thought during the period from the late 1790's to early 1830's has two aims. The first is to investigate Malthus' economic thought in the context of the theology and his Whig inclinations. The second is to reveal the diversities in the understanding of ‘commercial society’ among his contemporaries.
To begin with the latter point, the Edinburgh Review played an important role as the conveyer of the idea of the art of government and the analysis of ‘commercial society’ from the eighteenth-century Scottish tradition to the nineteenth-century British economic arguments. In this context, when Ricardo's Principles was published, McCulloch considered it not as the subsitution but as the compensation for Smith's Wealth of Nations. But in the decade of 1820's there were several points severely debated; for example, whether to accept the idea of the ‘conjectural history’, how to evaluate the result of the industrialization, and what kind of the position to be selected on the problem on Parliamentary Reform.
In comparison with these arguments, Malthus' position is able to be characterized as that of medium. In some cases, Malthus judged on the political or economic problem not from the maximum of wealth but from that of happiness or safety. So, for Malthus, the concept of ‘proportions’ has the especial importance to the economic reasoning.