Malthus and Ricardo on the Dismal Science

There is general agreement that Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) are founders of political economy (Roll 1973: 173). Their status depends to a large extent on two, but profoundly influential, publications: An Essay on Population in 1798 and Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. Nevertheless, they produced a voluminous collection of publications. Pietro Sraffa's edition of Ricardo ran to eleven volumes. Malthus is also recognised in his own right as a founding figure of political economy, but his development of social science has in the past often been overshadowed by moral criticism that is blind to his real scientific contributions. In this chapter, I promote the idea that Malthus and Ricardo were also founders of sociology without whom there would be, for example, no Marxist sociology of social class. When Ricardo introduced the growth of manufacturing into the third edition of Principles, then wages cannot rise and the conflict between capitalists and landlords over rent evaporated to be replaced by a conflict between capitalists and workers as machines replaced labour (Davis 1993). Thus, the foundation of Marx's class theory was already well developed in classical political economy. Sociology in the case of Max Weber's generation emerged out of economics conceived as a ‘science of man’ that examined the ‘conditions of existence’ of people. Thus, sociology was already embedded in the Historical School of German ‘political economy’ (Hennis 1988: 105–45). German economists rejected Adam Smith's ‘cosmopolitanism’ in which nations freely traded with each other to their mutual benefit. For Weber, economics was a political science based on national struggle for domination. Weber was only too aware of issues around population growth and immigration from a national perspective (Tribe 1989). Prussian Junkers were hiring Polish workers to lower their costs of production, thereby displacing the German population. In his 1895 Inaugural Address to the University of Freiberg, he criticised the policies that resulted in the displacement of German by Polish workers in the East Elbian provinces of Prussia with disastrous effects on German character and culture. Weber concluded: ‘As usual, a large number of children follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living, since this tends to obliterate any calculation of future welfare.