Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766 into a comfortably well-to-do English family. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was ordained a clergyman of the Church of England. In 1805 he was appointed to the faculty of the East India Company's college at Haileybury, where he held the first British professorship of political economy. He kept that post until his death in 1834.
Malthus lived in tumultuous times marked by two great class conflicts. The industrial revolution was built on the sacrifice of the working class: long factory hours, child labor, filthy cities, and wages that bought less and less bread. Workers who resisted, such as the Luddites who smashed machines or the early unions outlawed by the Combination Act of 1799, were harshly punished. At the same time, the old landowning class and the new industrial capitalists fought for control of Parliament. The central issue was whether Britain would stay an agricultural nation or become the workshop of the world, a battle fought most openly over the Corn Laws.
His most famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was written against the radical reformers William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who believed that society could be remade to end poverty. Malthus answered that population, when unchecked, grows geometrically and doubles every twenty-five years, while food can grow at best arithmetically. Population must therefore be held down by "preventive" checks that lower the birth rate or "positive" checks that raise the death rate, which he summed up as moral restraint, vice, and misery. From this he concluded that poverty was the inevitable lot of the majority, and that the Poor Laws and any redistribution of wealth would only make things worse. A heavily revised second edition appeared in 1803.
From about 1814 onward his attention turned to the struggle between landlords and capitalists, and he became a consistent defender of the landlords. In 1815 he published a theory of rent based on differences in the fertility of the soil, developed at the same time as David Ricardo's. In his Principles of Political Economy (1820) he argued, against Adam Smith and Ricardo, that a capitalist economy can suffer "gluts," general depressions caused by too little "effectual demand." His remedy was to keep rents high, for example through the Corn Laws, so that landlords and their servants would spend on goods they did not produce. Ricardo replied that this was like saying a fire in the warehouse helps business.
Malthus's legacy is enormous and contested. His population theory inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and versions of it still shape thinking about less-developed countries. His theory of gluts, which Hunt calls his most important and lasting contribution, was later revived by John Maynard Keynes. Critics from Marx to Hunt and Lautzenheiser argue that the normative message of his population theory is that poverty is inevitable, that little can be done about it, and that it is mainly the fault of the poor. That argument is why his name still sparks debate more than two centuries later.
Based on E. K. Hunt & Mark Lautzenheiser, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, 3rd ed. (M.E. Sharpe, 2011), ch. 4, pp. 65–90.