Donald Winch
Poverty and Pauperism: From Smith to Malthus1
My interest in this subject begins from two general propositions that have been repeated
so often that they deserve to be treated as the conventional stereotypes. The first of these
states that the Wealth of Nations marks a break in eighteenth-century attitudes towards the
‘labouring poor’, where the break can be symbolized by Adam Smith’s sustained attack on
what have come to be known as ‘utility-of-poverty’ doctrines. These doctrines turned on the
importance of low wages to the supply of labour effort and to sustaining competitiveness
in a world where maintenance of a favourable balance of trade was taken to be one of the
chief barometers of national success.2 The second proposition, often linked with the first by
those interested in the development of ideas on poverty after Smith, maintains that Malthus
was responsible for creating an equally significant rupture between Smith’s ‘optimism’ and
the ‘pessimistic and demoralized’ intellectual world that ultimately resulted in the Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834.3 While the first of these propositions still provides a useful starting
point for any history of social theory that has the relationship between riches and poverty as
its central theme, the second has often been expressed in ways that are merely tendentious,
frequently having as their implied or overt object the search for a scapegoat. Nevertheless,
the second proposition continues to express something many have felt when passing from
Smith’s secular, ironic, and humane prose to Malthus’s Christian pieties, bio-economic
certainties, and ‘melancholy’ conclusions on the prospects for raising the living standards of
the mass. Although there are grounds for thinking that something significant happened to the
1
This article appeared as ‘Pauvreté et paupérisme: De Smith à Malthus’ in Pauvreté et assistance en Grande-Bretagne
1688-1834 edited by Paul Denizot and Cécile Révauger, Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1999. Pp. 205-224. It
was also published as ‘Poverty and Pauperism: From Smith to Malthus’, Kumamoto Journal of Economics, 3, 4, 1998, 1-15.
2
For one of the earliest and fullest treatments of ‘utility-of-poverty’ doctrines see Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the
Laborer in a System of Nationalism; A Study of Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists, New York, 1920 (reissued,
1957). Another influential treatment of the subject can be found in A. W. Coats, ‘Changing Attitudes to Labour in the MidEighteenth Century’, originally published in 1958, but now included in his collected essays On the History of Economic
Thought, London, 1992, pp. 64-84.
3
For two recent examples of this genre, arrived at via different political routes, see G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty,
New York, 1984, Chapter 4 (a conclusion regarding Malthus that is carried over to its sequel, Poverty and Compassion; The
Moral Imagination of he Late Victorians, New York, 1992, pp. 17-18); and M. Deane, The Constitution of Poverty; Towards
a Genealogy of Liberal Governance, London, 1991, pp. 16, 76, 84, 120, 136, 146-7. For my criticism of these interpretation
see ‘Robert Malthus: Christian Moral Scientist, Arch-Demoralizer or Implicit Secular Utilitarian, Utilitas 5, pp. 239-53.
1
debate on poverty and pauperism in Britain during the period that separates Smith’s death in
1790 from the publication of the first version of Malthus’s Essay on Population in 1798, it is
still necessary to seek more satisfactory interpretations for what occurred -- interpretations
that are more faithful to the complex mixture of continuity and discontinuity embodied in
the intellectual and economic history of the episode.
I
The rejection of ‘utility-of -poverty’ doctrines can be treated as an important byproduct of the
movement associated with the Scottish Enlightenment and the new versions of the science
of political economy which it fostered. By the time Smith published his attack on those who
complained that ‘luxury extends itself even to the lowest of the people’ by maintaining that
‘what improves the circumstances of the greater part [of every great political society] can
never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole’ (WN, I, viii. 36-7), his friend, David
Hume, had already expressed similar attitudes in his moral and political essays.4 In view of
the later importance Malthus succeeded in attaching to population doctrines when discussing
poverty and pauperism, one of the most interesting illustrations of this fact can be found
in Hume’s exchanges with Robert Wallace on the subject. Although they adopted opposed
positions on the consequences of luxury for populousness in the modern and ancient worlds,
Wallace was at one with Hume in believing that higher real wages achieved through cheap
subsistence could not be considered disadvantageous to national strength. Treating the poor
simply as ‘serviceable for supporting the grandeur and heightening the luxury of a few’ was a
‘narrow maxim’ that ‘can never surely serve to make a nation in general great and populous,
or society happy’.5 There can be no doubt, however, that Smith’s defence of high wages, his
proof that capital accumulation was the only effective means by which high and rising wage
levels could be achieved, and his general revaluation of the indices by which the progress
and purposes of rising levels of opulence should be judged, went far beyond anything to be
4
‘Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy he fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of
he conveniencies of life. No-one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much
less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to the poor.’ See essay ‘Of Commerce in Polittcal Essays, edited by K.
Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge, 1993, p. 102.
5
R. Wallace, Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, Edinburgh, 1753, pp. 151-2
2
found in the work of his Scottish contemporaries, including Hume. The Wealth of Nations
truly was a crucial turning point in the discourse on riches and poverty as it had evolved
during the eighteenth century.6
Smith did not depart from the orthodox pro-populationist position common to most
eighteenth-century authors: a rising population remained ‘the most decisive mark of the
prosperity of any country’ (WN, I.viii.23). He also endorsed what Malthus was later to make
a central feature of the population principle: ‘Every species of animals naturally multiplies
in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond
it.’ (WN, I.viii.39) Moreover, what Malthus was to call the ‘positive’ check, operating through
premature death rates, clearly plays a part in Smith’s thinking: fertility rates among the poor
were higher than those of the rich, the crucial difference being that inadequate subsistence
prevented many of their offspring from surviving.7 But here the pattern of similarities begins
to break down, and it does so on two fronts: Smith’s divergence from his contemporaries
on the best means of achieving a rising population, and the new priorities, most evident in
the prominence given to the Poor Laws, that arose from Malthus’s attack on the underlying
complacency of pro-populationist ideas.
Those who approached the problem of populousness via the debate on luxury, where
this includes Sir James Steuart, as well as Hume and Wallace, saw the problem as one of
seeking a balance between the various factors that contributed to, or inhibited, population
growth. In Steuart’s case this led to advice on the best ways in which the statesman could
solve the basic subsistence problem by promoting an optimal distribution of the population
between agriculture and other employments -- a doctrine that saddled the statesman with
responsibilities for allocating investment which Smith was anxious to disavow.8 A rising
6
For a fuller defence of this conclusion see my Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in
Britain, 1750-1834,. Cambridge, 1996. Chapters 3 and 4.
7
‘...it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication
of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful
marriages produce.’; WN, I, viii.39.
8
‘The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner hey ought to employ their capitals, would
not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted not only to
no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which should nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man
who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.’ (WN, I. viii.39)
3
population, for Smith, was the desirable byproduct of the process of capital accumulation,
whereby the demand for labour would consistently exceed the supply of labour and, by raising
real wages, enable a larger number of the offspring of the poor to survive (WN, I.viii.40).
In this respect, a rising population was exactly what Smith said it was, a decisive mark of
prosperity rather than something that needed to be an explicit goal of any science of the
legislator based on the ‘system of natural liberty’.
For Malthus, on the other hand, neither the basic pro-populationist position, nor Smith’s
sanguine account of the benefits associated with capital accumulation, could be accepted
without revision. First, he conceived of the problem of population pressure on the living
standards of the poor as an ever-present one at work in all societies rather than an occasional
misfortune or -- as his immediate opponents, William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet,
were to argue -- as a distant prospect. The high rates of infant mortality among the poor
to which Smith had drawn attention became for Malthus an index of the ‘vice and misery’
associated with the checks brought on by the operation of the population principle. They were
a sign that the birth rates of an earlier period of temporary prosperity were inappropriate under
later conditions of reduced demand for labour. A cyclical perspective was being substituted
for Smith’s more secular and open-ended interpretation of economic growth, though since
the ‘oscillations’ stressed by Malthus were not incompatible with acknowledging a slowly
rising trend in living standards, the difference of point of view, on this issue at least, did not
have to be a stark one.
Secondly, however, Malthus challenged what he took to be an implication of Smith’s
doctrines regarding capital accumulation, namely that it would always benefit wage-earners,
even when it was concentrated in manufacturing rather than agriculture. In 1798, though
with decreasing emphasis later, he questioned this conclusion as well as Smith’s opinion
that the living standards of the English poor had risen gradually since the revolution of
1688.9 Although these positions were advanced merely in outline in the first Essay, they
9
‘The increasing wealth of the nation has had little or no tendency to better the condition of the labouring poor. They have
not, I believe, a greater command of the necessaries and conveniencies of life, and a much greater proportion of them, than
at the period of the revolution is employed in manufactures, and crowded together in close and unwholesome rooms.’ First
Essay, a facsimile reprint of the 1798 edition published for the Royal Economic Society, London, 1926, pp. 312-13.
4
were to become the basis for two further propositions that were to dominate post-Smithian
political economy in Britain for the first three decades of the nineteenth century. First, that
economic growth need not have the beneficial consequences attributed to it by Smith if the
agrarian bottleneck created by diminishing returns in domestic agriculture was not relieved
in some way; and, secondly, that the growth of manufacturing occupations at the expense of
agriculture might be achieved at the expense of the ‘happiness and comfort’ of wage-earners.
Only the second of these propositions was peculiar to Malthus: the first provided the common
basis on which both Malthus and his friend and rival, David Ricardo, constructed their
respective models of growth and distribution, each drawing their own distinctive conclusions
and policy recommendations from them. It is important to note, however, that the one
policy conclusion on which there was no hint of disagreement concerned the damaging
consequences of the Poor Laws, as currently administered. As Ricardo put this in his
Principles: ‘[The] pernicious tendency of these laws is no longer a mystery since it has been
fully developed by the able hand of Mr. Malthus; and every friend to the poor must ardently
wish for their abolition.’10
So far, the story may appear largely to conform with conventional accounts of the
transition from Smithian ‘optimism’ to Malthusian (and Ricardian) ‘pessimism’. It certainly
accords with Malthus’s acknowledgment that his ideas had cast a ‘melancholy hue’ over
prospects for permanent improvements in the living standards of the poor. At this point,
however, it is necessary to note another influential reading of the evidence advanced by
the economic historian and historical demographer, E. A. Wrigley, which treats Smith,
Malthus, and Ricardo as techno-pessimists, speaking with one voice about the constraints
on exponential improvements in living standards posed by the limitations of an organic, or
pre-industrial, economy.11 Although I cannot do the subject justice here, let me summarize
my chief reservations about Wrigley’s interpretation. It requires one to believe that the
Malthusian model of population pressure, combined with the idea of a rising trend in food
10
Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by P. Sraffa, Cambrige in 11 volumes, 1952-73, I, p. 106.
The most convenient source of Wrigley’s position can be found in his chapter on ‘The Classical Economists and the
Industrial Revolution’ in his People, Cities and Wealth, Oxford, 1987.
11
5
prices as a result of diminishing returns, can be found in embryonic form in Smith; and that
all three classical authors were united in fearing falling profits, the impending exhaustion
of investment opportunities, and the consequential onset of a stationary state. Although
Wrigley’s interpretation provides powerful insights into the problems of a pre-industrial
economy reliant on land as the sole source of energy, human and animal, the evidence linking
Smith firmly with the later concerns of Malthus and Ricardo does not strike me as convincing.
It overlooks those features of Smith’s more open-ended view of growth through expanding
markets and increasing returns that Malthus and Ricardo were not prepared to make an
integral part of the models they constructed to deal with problems that became more urgent
and acute after Smith’s death. Expressed less abstractly, I do not think that the problems of a
stationary economy, the ‘want, famine, and mortality’ that Smith discerned in the polar case
of China are relevant to his diagnosis of what might be possible in more enlightened European
economies and polities, or indeed in China itself if different policies towards foreign trade
were pursued.12
II
The relevance of this digression may become clearer by turning to another important
discontinuity between Smith and his immediate followers, namely the absence of any concern
with the specific problems of pauperism and poor relief, as opposed to those conditions which
accounted for low wages and poverty. It is well known that Smith only dealt with one aspect of
the English Poor Laws, the laws relating to settlement. On this subject he expressed opinions
about their detrimental consequences for labour mobility, and as ‘an evident violation of
natural liberty and justice’ in hindering the ‘sacred’ rights of labour to obtain the highest price
for its services, that some of his successors found exaggerated.13 Malthus himself adopted
Smith’s stance initially, but retreated from it when he recognised that the settlement laws
had the compensating advantage of bringing home the costs of supporting paupers to those
12
WN, I.viii.24-6; and I.ix.14-15.
See WN, I.x.c.44-59 and IV.ii.42. The earliest critic was J. Howlett, The Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase
of the Poor and of the Poor’s Rates have been Commonly Ascribed, London, 1788, p. 115. The charge was also taken up
by Frederick Morton Eden, in his State of the Poor, London, 1797, volume I, pp. 296-8.
13
6
charged with administering poor relief in the parishes most affected. It is possible to argue,
of course, that significance attaches to Smith’s failure to condemn the Poor Laws more
generally.14 But arguments based on silence are notoriously speculative; they often rely for
closure on an implicit appeal to teleology -- to the dubious idea, for example, that Smith was
capable of anticipating issues that only acquired significance after his death. The safest course
in such circumstances seems to be recognition that Smith did not consider other aspects of the
English system by which poor relief was administered to be relevant to anything he wished
to maintain in the Wealth of Nations. Specialists in modern public finance have noted that,
despite his concern with the burden of public debt, Smith did not draw attention to the fact that
half of the public expenditure that was not spent for military purposes or on servicing the debt
was devoted to poor relief.15 Indeed, the entire idea of mandatory or legislative redistribution
from rich to poor plays little role in the Wealth of Nations, for reasons that will feature later
in this paper. It seems wiser to assume, therefore, that the problems to which Malthus was
later to attach his name were not discernible to Smith for solid reasons connected with the
social and economic history of the period.
Evidence in support of this interpretation can be derived from reactions to two periods of
acute grain scarcity that occurred in 1794-5 and 1799-1800. For Smith, the term ‘labouring
poor’ was merely neutral description, though it went along with general sympathy for
any measure that improved their condition. By the 1790s, if we take Edmund Burke’s
position as symptomatic, if not entirely typical, it had become a matter of contention.
Reacting vehemently to interventionist proposals for dealing with grain scarcity in 1794-5,
at a time when Burke was also much exercised by questions of public order in the wake
of revolutionary events in France, he regarded the term as tendentious and sentimental,
mere ‘puling jargon’ that had potentially dangerous connotations for public stability. Far
from Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, published posthumously in 1800, being
14
This appears to be the position adopted by G. Himmelfarb; see her Idea of Poverty, p. 61. Hence too her speculation
that: ‘Had Smith been alive, he might well have given a different direction to social thought and policy, forestalling the
acrimonious debate over the New Poor Law of 1834 and the still more virulent animosities generated by that law’ (p.66).
15
See R. A. Musgrave, ‘Adam Smith on Public Finance and Distribution’ in T. Wilson and A. S. Skinner (eds), the Market
and the State; Essays in Honour of Adam Smith, Oxford, 1976, p.297.
7
an extension of Smith’s attitudes on such matters, it is possible to argue that Burke was
anticipating the position we now associate with Malthus.16 There are hints that Burke
attributed poverty to number alone, and he was keen to deny that the poor had any right to
relief during periods of scarcity that went beyond private charity.17 It is also true that Malthus,
in less ferocious fashion, was anxious to point out the drawbacks of the policies of relief
followed during the next major period of scarcity in 1799-1800. What is often overlooked,
however, is the fact that although Malthus was to emerge in 1803 as the leading advocate
of long-term abolition of the legal right to relief under the Poor Laws, he acknowledged
the justification for public relief in 1800 and during subsequent periods of acute distress on
grounds that combine humanity with utilitarianism.18 Moreover, despite the fact that issues of
public unrest feature prominently among Malthus’s concerns during and after the Napoleonic
wars, his chief regret was that such unrest made it difficult to introduce those necessary
constitutional changes that would extend civil and political liberties to the populace at large
-- a position that does not square with Burke’s defense of the constitutional status quo, or
with the political opinions of those romantic followers of Burke who became Malthus’s most
bitter critics.
Burke’s unreliable status as a disciple of Smith, and the underlying differences between
the politics of Burke and Malthus, a Foxite Whig during the Napoleonic wars, make Thoughts
and Details a dubious guide to the changes in attitude towards pauperism that took place
in post-Smithian political economy as a result of Malthus’s intervention. For this purpose,
Frederick Morton Eden’s massive inquiry into The State of the Poor (1797), also undertaken
in the wake of the earlier period of scarcity, is more indicative of moderate opinion on the
subject. It was written from a perspective that reveals Eden’s general adherence to Smith’s
system of natural liberty in economic affairs. Karl Marx regarded Eden as the only eighteenth16
The position adopted by J. R. Poynter in what is still the most thorough treatment of the period; see Society and
Pauperism; English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795-1834, London, 1969, pp. 53-5.
17
On the mixture of moral, economic, and political arguments that inform Burke’s position see Marie-Cecile Revauger,
‘Edmund Burke: La Pauvrete n’est pas une affaire d’Etat’, Les Cahier de L’Observatoire, 4., 1991, 43-57. See also Riches
and Poverty, Chapter 8.
18
As he said of the Poor Laws in An Investigation of the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions (1800), ‘their
operation in the present scarcity has been advantageous to the country’, a tribute to the ‘honour, the humanity and generosity
of the higher and middle classes’: see Works, VII, pp. 9, 13.
8
century disciple of Smith to produce a work of any significance, thereby showing a tolerance
towards Eden that was entirely absent in his attitude to Malthus.19 Eden’s perspective
was that of an enlightened philanthropist with considerable practical knowledge of Poor
Law administration, friendly societies, and the insurance principle.20 He was judiciously
unfavourable to legislative regulation in the Smithian manner, while remaining unconvinced
by Smith’s opinions on the settlement laws and the drawbacks associated with the division
of labour. Eden also went beyond anything to be found in the Wealth of Nations to question
the permanent value of Poor Law provision, thereby anticipating Malthus’s opposition to the
allowance system in the first Essay. Malthus did not refer to Eden in this work, and only seems
to have had access to a copy of The State of the Poor in 1799, when he expressed pleasure
in finding that it ‘tends very much to confirm my opinion of the inefficiency of all regular
establishments for the poor’.21 It is not without significance -- and here an argument based on
silence may be relevant -- that while Malthus was always pleased to cite and acknowledge
the importance of Eden’s work from this point onwards, Burke’s Thoughts and Details is not
mentioned in any of his writings, despite the posthumous fame of its author and the fact that
Malthus’s own contribution to the debate on scarcity in 1800 appeared in the same year as
Burke’s pamphlet.
Eden’s argument on the dangers of the Poor Laws has other features that make it a
curtain-raiser for what Malthus was to contend in the following year and later, though it
is still necessary to stress that Eden showed no sign of departing from Smith’s essentially
pro-populationist position. He anticipated the first decennial population census in 1801 by
bringing out his own Estimate of the Number of Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland
in the previous year, undershooting the census figures by just under 5 million. This did
not, initially at least, differentiate him from Malthus, who had also under-estimated the size
and rate of growth of population in 1798. The crucial new idea introduced by Malthus was
19
See Capital, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, I. p. 616; see also note to same page for an indication of Marx’s
hostility to Malthus.
20
See J. Carré, ‘Sir Frederick Morton Eden e le Problème de la Pauvreté, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,
311, 1993, pp. 257-71
21
See letter to his father dated February 4, 1799, as cited in John Pullen’s variorum edition of the Principles of Political
Economy, Cambridge, 1989, volume II, p. 400.
9
that population pressure had always been a consistent force depressing wages and living
conditions generally. Nevertheless, it is not hard to find in Eden a clear foretaste of what was
to become a central feature of Malthus’s argument with Godwin and other radicals on the
feasibility of a society based on equality and without property laws. Consider the following
statement by Eden criticising legal provision for the poor:
‘...[it] checks that emulative spirit of exertion, which the want of necessaries, or the no less
powerful demand for the superfluities of life, gives birth to: for it assures a man, that, whether
he may have been indolent, improvident, prodigal, or vicious, he shall never suffer want: it
weakens the strongest tie of civil society; the desire of acquiring property; for it declares,
that, whether a man is industrious or idle, his most pressing difficulties, the necessities of
food, lodging, and cloathing, shall be provided for.’22
There is even a hint here of an idea that has brought so much obloquy on Malthus’s name,
his stress on the indispensability of the ‘goad of necessity’ and the fear of falling in the social
scale as an essential motivating feature of commercial societies. This argument was first used
against Condorcet’s social insurance schemes in 1798, but was repeated in all subsequent
encounters with egalitarian ideas. Eden, therefore, prefigures Malthus’s stress on the growing
problem of dependency created by the Poor Laws, and does so from a point of view that is
as much political as economic, with both elements having a Smithian pedigree.
These issues of dependency, and the association of property acquisition with the ‘ties of
civil society’, provide important links of a broadly political kind with the position upheld
by Smith in Book III of the Wealth of Nations. In that book, Smith dealt with the relations
between town and country, the rise of commercial society from the ruins of feudal society,
and the connections between commerce and liberty, with Hume being credited with the first
historical insights into the connection. It was an account of how ‘commerce and manufactures
gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of
individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual
state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors’.23 Malthus
may have had serious reservations about the unbalanced growth of manufacturing at the
22
23
State of the Poor, I, p. 448.
WN, III.iv.4.
10
expense of agriculture in Britain, but it is equally important to notice that this did not prevent
him from wholeheartedly endorsing the Hume-Smith arguments on commerce and liberty:
‘Yet though the condition of the individual employed in common manufacturing labour
is not by any means desirable, most of the effects of manufactures and commerce on the
general state of society are in the highest degree beneficial. They infuse fresh life and activity
into all classes of the state, afford opportunities for the inferior orders to rise by personal
merit and exertion, and stimulate the higher orders to depend for distinction upon other
grounds than mere rank and riches. They excite invention, encourage science and the useful
arts, spread intelligence and spirit, inspire taste for conveniences and comforts among the
labouring classes; and, above all, give a new and happier structure to society, by increasing
the proportion of the middle classes, that body on which the liberty, public spirit and good
government of every country must mainly depend.’24
Concentration on the novel aspects of Malthus’s stress on the population principle should
not obscure the underlying continuties between Malthus and Smith on these fundamental
moral and political considerations. They explain why Malthus’s objections to the Poor Laws
were as much based on such considerations, involving civil liberties, as they were on the
better-known economic dimensions of the problem of rising expenditure on poor relief to
able-bodied labour --- the encouragement to early marriage, the spread of pauperism, and
the lowering of real wages. As he stated in the first Essay, the worst aspect of the Poor
Laws, despite their benevolent intention, was that they had resulted in ‘the whole class of the
common people of England [being] subject to a set of grating, inconvenient, and tyrannical
laws, totally inconsistent with the genuine spirit of the constitution’.25 The crux of his case
against Condorcet’s insurance scheme was not only that it removed the ‘goad of necessity’,
placing the idle and improvident on the same footing as those who were active, prudent, and
industrious, but that administration of the scheme would entail an ‘inquisition’ to distinguish
between the worthy and unworthy. It would, in short, create something akin to the English
24
The statement comes from Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws (1814) as reprinted in The Works of
Thomas Robert Malthus edited by E. A. Wrigley and D. Souden, London, 1986, volume VII, pp. 101-2. The wording
suggests that Hume’s essays on commerce and on the rise and progress of the arts was Malthus’s source. Hume’s
essays are frequently cited by Malthus, and were clearly a favourite source. The same sentiments were also expressed
in the First Essay ( pp. 293-4) when countering Godwin’s ideas.
25
First Essay, p.92.
11
Poor Laws on a larger scale, and hence be ‘completely destructive of the true principles of
liberty and equality.’26
What makes these comparisons between Malthus and Condorcet -- to whom can now
be added Thomas Paine, Condorcet’s ally on matters of social insurance, and another of the
radicals whom Malthus attacked -- relevant to my theme is the fact that all three authors
were, in their different ways, disciples of Smith’s system of natural liberty. Each of them
regarded commercial society as the best foundation for future progress. Where Condorcet
and Paine differed from Smith was in believing that the system of natural liberty needed to
be supplemented by schemes of redistribution that would speed the equalising tendencies
they attributed to commercial society and provide a basis for republican government, thereby
completing what the American revolution had shown was possible, and the early years of the
French revolution had promised. When the cast of Smith’s successors is expanded to include
Condorcet and Paine, it becomes clear that Malthus, in opposing them, has superior claims to
Smith’s legacy, while at the same time introducing novel emphases of his own. To show why
this reading seems valid requires a few words to be said on the reasons for Malthus’s changes
of emphasis, followed by a return to the peculiarities of Smith’s position on the relationship
between riches and poverty.
III
Malthus always regarded Smith as having privileged status in matters of political economy
generally. The whole of his teaching at the East India College was based on the Wealth of
Nations, and it was one of his most serious charges against the ‘new political economy’ of
Ricardo that it had departed too far from the master on some crucial doctrinal issues. In
articulating his case against the unbalanced nature of Britain’s growth during the Napoleonic
wars, however, Malthus found it helpful to return to the physiocrats and those contemporaries
of Smith, Steuart especially, who had discussed the optimal relationship between agricultural
and manufacturing activities. In this respect, Malthus was reviving questions that Smith
26
First Essay, pp.149-50. For further consideration of this subject see my ‘Malthus versus Condorcet Revisited’, European
Journal of the History of Economic Thought,, 3:1, 1996, 45-61.
12
had dismissed as incompatible with the system of natural liberty. The rapid growth of
manufacturing at the expense of agriculture and Malthus’s concern with security of food
supplies during the war had created circumstances that required him to reconsider an
important feature of Smith’s system, the one that centred on the benefits unqualifiedly
associated with capital accumulation. It was also to lead Malthus into his most important act
of apostasy in the eyes of other disciples of Smith -- his opposition to repeal of the Corn
Laws in 1815.
Despite these unorthodox moves, however, there is a case for saying that Malthus was
attempting to reinstate a world that had been taken for granted by Smith but was rapidly
disappearing during the Napoleonic war period. As we know better in hindsight than Malthus
could know at the time, the war coincided with and contributed to a series of changes in
British society that could not be foreseen by Smith. Thus it was during this period that Britain
became a net importer of foodstuffs on a regular basis; when her population was growing
faster than at any other period in her history, then or since; and when expenditure on poor
relief, particularly in the rural counties of southern England, was rising more alarmingly
than at any other time. Malthus’s anxieties, then, were not simply centred on the question of
security of food supplies under war conditions, or even on the possibility that Britain might
be subject to the kind of revolutionary disturbances that had occurred in France, but on the
fact that what had once been a ‘landed’ nation, enjoying a large degree of self-sufficiency,
was now having to rely on more volatile markets for her manufactured goods to support
a rising population that was increasingly being forced to make its living in unstable and
unhealthy urban settings. It was the combination of these circumstances that led him to
advance remedies designed to recapture some of the features that accounted for the relative
stability of Smith’s world.
The peculiarities of Smith’s position can best be approached by returning to a point
touched on in passing earlier: his lack of interest in legislative methods of redistributing
income from rich to poor. Those who know that every reference to the labouring poor
in the Wealth of Nations is sympathetic to their condition, especially those who approach
13
Smith via later economic ideas based on diminishing marginal utility of income and the
redistributional activities, through taxation and public expenditure, of modern states, may
find this anomalous. When the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) is brought into the
reckoning, however, the anomaly becomes an indication of something basic to Smith’s moral
and political vision. In this work Smith upholds a thoroughly anti-utilitarian position by
maintaining that once a minimum standard of comfort has been achieved, additional wealth
merely brings ‘baubles and trinkets’ rather than additions to happiness (TMS, IV.i.1.10). The
foolish expenditure of the rich redistributes income to the poor through employment, just as,
in Book III of the WN, it undermines the military power of the feudal barony and generates the
conditions necessary to modern liberty associated with security under the rule of law. In the
first two books of WN, however, Smith had shown that there was a superior way of benefitting
the poor than luxury expenditure. He argued that an increase in the ratio of productive to
unproductive expenditure would interact with the division of labour and expanding markets
to generate an improvement in the absolute living standards of wage-earners. One of the chief
objectives of Smith’s political economy -- ‘to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for
the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue for themselves’ (WN,
IV.1) -- could best be secured in this fashion.
TMS provides additional clues to Smith’s position when he contrasts the virtues of justice
and beneficence. Although justice is a negative virtue it can be made the subject of precise
rules and penalties, with the result that ‘we feel ourselves to be under a stricter obligation to
act according to justice, than agreeably to friendship, charity, or generosity’ (TMS, II.ii.1.5;
III.6.9-11). Whereas justice can be enforced, beneficence must be ‘left in some measure
to our own choice’. Hence the consignment of beneficence to the realm of ‘imperfect’ as
opposed to ‘perfect’ obligations. Smith’s explicit restriction of justice to commutative issues
of meum and tuum conforms with this distinction; and in denying that questions of distributive
justice can be made the subject of precise rules without infringing liberty and security of
property, Smith is once more in harmony with Hume, with Hugo Grotius acting as a common
14
source. The ideas we entertain on relative merit and need that might underpin any system of
redistribution are not robust or consensual enough to support coercive action by the state.
Readers of TMS are also made aware that deference within a society composed of ranks
based on tangible forms of wealth is a natural phenomenon with important consequences
for the ‘peace and order of society’, despite the fact that it was based on a corruption in our
moral sentiments -- a propensity to defer to the rich and powerful rather than true merit. This
accounted for another asymmetry: ‘Our respect for the great...is most apt to offend by its
excess; our fellow-feeling for the miserable, by its defect’ (TMS, VI.ii.1.21). Smith is arguing
the hard-headed case: this is how things are because that is how we are most of the time,
with the further implication, however, that things are best arranged in this manner. The result
is that beggars become contemptible in our eyes, poverty is seen as avoidable, and charity
must be purely voluntary. A similar tough-mindedness characterises Smith’s treatment of the
laws of property in WN:
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there
must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of
the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both
driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter
of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the
labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night
in security.’ (WN, V.i.b.2)
The main purpose of civil government, then, is to allow the rich to sleep soundly by protecting
the inequalities of commercial society. For without security from the ‘indignation of the poor’
no such society could operate, no calculation involving stable expectations could take place,
and no regular habits of private frugality successfully invested could take root.
This enables one to grasp why Malthus could legitimately lay claim to Smith’s legacy
when criticising egalitarian radicals and visionaries. One way of interpreting Malthus would
be to say that he sought to dissolve the concept of pauperism seen as a class exercising
a legal claim against the rest of the community simply by virtue of their collective status.
Malthus’s ideal of prudence and forethought being encouraged by the ‘goad of necessity’
as well as by the ‘personal respectability’ that would come from wider extension of civil
15
and political liberties can legitimately be described as involving embourgeoisement. It is a
development of Smith’s priorities in enabling the poor to provide for themselves, yet goes
well beyond anything Smith had to say about the benefits of extending political participation
to the poor. The furthest Smith was prepared to go in this direction can be found in his
advocacy of a scheme of parochial schools on the Scottish model, where he case goes well
beyond vocational skills to encompass civic ones as well.27 Here the state had responsibilities
for which it was uniquely qualified, and it is therefore not surprising to find Malthus citing
Smith’s arguments on education when he took up the cause himself.28
Yet there is still something missing in Smith that goes beyond his failure to deal with the
legal entitlement to poor relief: a thorough treatment of the obligation called charity. There
are only three references to charity in the whole of TMS: a minor fact, perhaps, but one that
probably indicates the secular qualities of Smith’s science of morals. Given the overwhelming
presence in eighteenth-century debates on poverty of Christian and other paternalist ideas
on the duties of the rich to the poor under the heading of charity, the secular and negative
libertarianism of Smith on this subject is remarkable. The contrasting emphasis given to
charity in the writings of Christian authors, such as both Burke and Malthus clearly were,
underlines this observation.
For Malthus, benevolence, unlike the passion between the sexes, was part of God’s
design – the part intended to draw together the ‘bonds of brotherly love – by giving men an
interest in the happiness and misery of their fellow creatures, to prompt them, as they have
power, to mitigate some of the partial evils arising from general laws, and thus to increase
the sum of human happiness.’ As with all natural passions, however, it was our duty to avoid
indiscriminate indulgence by applying the test of utility. Only by doing so could we avoid the
false forms of ‘forced’ charity associated with official poor relief, some general subscriptions
to charitable institutions, and allowing ourselves to be swayed by the sheer importunity of
beggars.
27
28
On this see my Adam Smith’s Politics, Cambridge, 1978, pp. 113-20.
See Essay, II, pp.151-5.
16
To retain its true character, namely when it conferred a blessing on both giver and
receiver, charity had to be discretionary, selective, and voluntary – even ‘despotic’. It had to
focus on ‘the silent and retiring sufferer, labouring under unmerited difficulties’, but should
not become so regular as to become ‘a fund on which [the poor] may confidently depend’.
The first claim on our benevolence was to relieve the urgent and accidental distresses of
the provident poor. In dealing with the idle and improvident – those who had not heeded St
Paul’s dictum that ‘If a man will not work, neither shall he eat’ – benevolence should be on
a lesser scale regulated by what would later emerge in Benthamite hands during the years
that immediately preceded passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act, as the ‘less-eligibility
principle’.29
In recent years some fine studies of Christian political economy, or ‘evangelical
economics,’ have been written.
30
These not only provide the background necessary to an
understanding of Malthus’s theology, they also show just how important his influence was
on Christian social thought, particularly after John Bird Sumner – a future Archbishop
of Canterbury and a member of the Poor Law Commission in 1832 – had published his
reconciliation of the principle of population with orthodox Anglicanism in his Records
of Creation in 1817. Followers of Malthus at Oriel College, Oxford, notably Edward
Coplestone, can now be seen as providing interpretations of Malthus’s message that made
it acceptable to liberal Tories and those members of the landed classes who were anxious
to take the lead in matters of practical poor law administration.31 One way of expressing the
aim of Malthus’s views on charity and poor relief would be to say that he sought to rescue
voluntary charity from the ‘forced’ varieties that had spread through use of the allowance
system. Alternatively, one could say that Malthus w as aiming to undermine the growing
29
Malthus’s version of this principle was as follows: ‘They should on no account be enabled to command as much of the
necessaries of life as can be obtained by the worst-paid common labour.’ This quotation, like the other cited in the text,
comes from his chapter ‘Of the Direction of our Charity in the Essay, II, pp. 156-63.
30
The most important of these studies is Boyd Hilton’s Age of Atonement; The influence of Evangelicalism on Social
and Economic Thought, 1795-1865. Oxford, 1988. It does not replace R. A. Soloway’s Prelates and People; Ecclesiastical
Thought in England, 1783-1852, London, 1969, and it can be supplemented by a study that focuses more closely
and analytically on Malthus, A. M. C. Waterman’s Revolution, Economics and Religion; Christian Political Economy,
1798-1833, Cambridge, 1991.
31
On his see two articles by P. Mandler, ‘The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus’, Past and Present, 117, 1987, pp.
131-57; and ‘Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law’, Historical Journal,
33, 1990, pp. 81-103.
17
influence of a concept of pauperism that treated those who fell into this category as a class
exercising a legal claim against the rest of the community simply by virtue of their collective
status.
Confirmation of this interpretation can be found n the writings of Coplestone, when
arguing that current administration of the Poor Laws entailed a ‘confusion of moral duty wit
the task of legislation’. Compulsion had destroyed ‘the very essence not only of benevolence,
but of all virtue’ because ‘[a]n action to be virtuous must be voluntary’. Copleston believed
that improved methods of administering relief that respected the less –eligibility principle
would enable the important distinction between preserving an propagating life to be
maintained; and this in turn meant that ‘indigence arising either from infirmity, age, infancy,
great number of children, and even accidental failure of employment’ could be the subject
of systematic legal relief. Holding such views –let us call them ‘optimistic’ ones for the
moment – he could envisage the replacement of the idea of the poor as a class, ‘as a sort of
permanent body -- possessed of positive rights and interests in their corporate capacity’, by a
loose aggregation of those ‘who from time to time may have lost their station as component
members of society’ and therefore could not expect anything more than charity while the
condition lasted.32 I have argued elsewhere that this best describes Malthus’s own position
during he last decade of so of his life.33
In conclusion I should like to return to the theme of my opening paragraph. It seems
clear that any interpretation of the transition from Smith to Malthus that runs in terms of
‘optimism’ on the one side and ‘pessimism’ and ‘demoralization’ on the other is not merely
oversimplified but deeply problematic. Later generations contrasted legal relief under the
Poor Laws with charity, to the detriment of the latter, but Smith’s position on justice and the
distinction of ranks left no space for the former and showed why charity, outside the realm
of our immediate family and friends, will never be our strongest impulse. By such standards
the polarities might just as well be reversed. Optimism and pessimism have never been very
32
E. Coplestone, A Second Letter to the Rt. Hon. Robert Peel… on the Causes of the Increase in Pauperism and on the
Poor Laws, Oxford, 1819, pp. 17-18, 28, 99.
33
See Riches and Poverty, pp. 320-22.
18
precise terms, not least because it is rarely evident whether they refer to the intentions of
the authors or to the impressions of their readers. Smith and Malthus wished to record their
diagnoses of poverty in as objective a fashion as they could manage, but in drawing attention
to obstacles, dilemmas, and pitfalls the purpose of their analyses was to suggest and provoke
action designed to overcome them. Smith has been accused of socio-economic determinism,
of carrying the virtues of impartial spectatorship too far, even of substituting ‘political’ for
‘moral’ economy. Malthus, similarly, has been accused of bio-economic fatalism, of arguing
that nothing could permanently ameliorate the condition of the mass of society. Neither of
these interpretations, in my opinion, commands respect, and if this is so, perhaps we would
be best advised to avoid the ambiguities of the contrast between optimism and pessimism
altogether.
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