An Essay on the Principle of Population (Great Minds Series) - Softcover

Malthus, Thomas Robert

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9781573922555: An Essay on the Principle of Population (Great Minds Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573922552 ISBN 13: 9781573922555

Publisher: Prometheus, 1999

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English economist and professor Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834) caused great public controversy among the optimistic positivitists of his day when his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) showed incontrovertibly that population, when unchecked, tends to increase faster than the availability of subsistence. Therefore preventive checks on population increase are necessary. Malthus, whose work influenced the research of Charles Darwin, admitted he was pessimistic about the future of humankind. He argued, through mathematical proofs and scientific documentation, that without population control the societal result is overcrowding, disease, war, poverty, and vice.

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Book Description:

This book provides a student audience with the best scholarly edition of Malthus' Essay on Population. Written in 1798 as a polite attack on post-French revolutionary speculations on the theme of social and human perfectibility, it remains one of the most powerful statements of the limits to human hopes set by the tension between population growth and natural resources.

From the Back Cover:

Malthus's simple yet powerful argument was highly controversial in its day. Literary England despised him for dashing its hopes of social progress. today his name remains a byword for active concern about man's demographic and ecological prospects.

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