Capitulo 2

2/ Gloomy Science

A

dam Smith’s upbeat assessment of the prospects for capitalism intervened in a long-standing political conflict between the declining landed aristocracy which had controlled British political life for generations and a new class of industrializing capitalists. Smith’s strong defense of property rights appealed to both sides of this divide, but his laissez-faireprescriptions for national economic policy threatened many of the entrenched special interests of the day.

Second Thoughts
Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo were the two outstanding successors to Smith in developing and qualifying his analysis of the historical prognosis for capitalism. Their work raised the specter of limits to capitalist growth arising from overpopulation and consequent upward pressureon the prices of food and raw materials. Malthus expressed major doubts about the wisdom and viability of unbridled capitalist development on a number of fronts. Ricardo shared many

45

of Malthus’s worries, but had a stronger interest in clearing the way for capitalist accumulation through policy reform. Malthus explicitly raises doubts about Adam’s Fallacy, questioning whether the path oflaissez-faire capitalist development can be consistent with a moral (in his terms, Christian) society. Ricardo, however, seems to accept Adam’s Fallacy as a rationale for pursuing unbridled capitalist accumulation. Malthus and especially Ricardo worked hard to address the logical gaps in Smith’s argument, supplying more rigorous analyses of population as well as theories of value and distribution.Malthus and Population
Thomas Malthus was an English clergyman who had a strong interest in the life of the English poor and working class, and an equally strong interest in political economy and philosophy. His 1799 pamphlet, later revised as a book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to demography, the systematic scientific study ofpopulation growth and its dynamics. Malthus’s ideas have had immense political influence, and continue to be expressed in contemporary debates over population growth, population control measures, and the management of the finite resources of the earth. Malthus corresponded and debated with Ricardo on political economic issues. Ricardo, as we shall see, adopted important parts of Malthus’s theories inconstructing his own system, but he strongly criticized Malthus for misunderstanding the principle of Say’s Law. Karl Marx also took Malthus’s work as a foil, vigorously criticizing his claim to have discovered universal laws of population, and arguing that Malthus’s ideas are a classic expression of the ideological prejudices of the British ruling-class coalition of landowners and capitalists.

46 /ADAM’S FALLACY

The Context of Malthus’s Essay
By the late eighteenth century it had become apparent, especially in England, that the systematic application of engineering and science to productive technology would revolutionize the productivity of labor, and make possible previously undreamed-of levels of wealth creation. The implications of this development became the subject of an ongoingphilosophical debate, which prefigures the politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The drama of the French Revolution, with its overturning of the centuries-old institutions of the ancien régime, fueled this debate and underlined the urgency of the issues at stake. Some optimists, among them William Godwin, the husband of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (and the father of MaryShelley, the creator of Frankenstein’s Monster), argued that the dawning new age would allow human beings to “perfect” society by eliminating the scourges of poverty, disease, war, and social conflict. The perfectibilist idea was that if the enormous surplus production inherent in the technological revolution were turned to social ends and distributed equally, it would provide the resources to bring...