Sir James Steuart on the Causes of Human Multiplication

Few ideas in social sciences are wholly original, and Malthus's principle population, enunciated exactly 200 years ago, is no exception. Among its many antecedents is contribution Scottish political economist Sir James Steuart (171380). Indeed, Marx, in his castigation Malthus in Capital, claimed that Malthus 's First Essay (that is, anonymous first edition 1798) contained very little but excerpts from Steuart. Population was not a large interest Steuart's, but it is subject opening chapters his major work, An Inquiry into Principles Political Oeconomy: Being an Essay on Science Domestic Policy in Free Nations (London, 1767). In them he sketched interaction between population growth and food supply over long-run course economic development, from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist and then, with emergence an agricultural surplus, to differentiated social classes and a money economy. At subsistence level, food and population were directly linked: the generative faculty resembles a spring loaded with a weight, which always exerts itself in proportion to diminution resistance.... If... food be increased, ... people will begin to be better fed; they will multiply, and in proportion as they increase in numbers, food will become scarce again. Malthus, in preface to second edition his Essay (1803), remarked that much more had been done than I had been aware of in 1798, and instances Steuart along with Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Young, Joseph Townsend, Montesquieu, and some French Economists. In this and later editions Malthus makes various, mostly favorable, references to Inquiry. The spring analogy is explicitly noted. Nine years after Inquiry was published, Adam Smith's Wealth Nations eclipsed Steuart's work-mainly by highly effective tactic totally ignoring it. Smith and Steuart were acquaintances and near contemporaries, but Steuart's somewhat dirigiste views (not to mention his stylistic device addressing a virtuous and benevolent statesman) were anathema to Smith, proponent self-regulating economy. However, Steuart was no advocate heavy-handed state planning: he saw spirit liberty as animating population, and his attention to prob

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