Logic and rhetoric in Malthus'sessay on the principle of population, 1798

1 February 1987

journal article
research article
Published by Taylor & Francis in Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 73 (1) , 1-17
https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638709383791

Abstract

Robert Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, written to refute the optimistic predictions of the Marquis de Condor‐cet and William Godwin, was acknowledged by contemporaries to be one of the most powerful works of its age. This article reviews the historical circumstances that disposed Malthus's readers to his views and, especially, analyzes the rhetoric of the Essay itself in an effort to explain the causes of Malthus's decisive victory over his opponents and to locate the sources of the Essay's enduring power.

Keywords

This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:

Malthus and his Contemporaries
History of Political Economy, 1974
Malthus on Godwin's "Of Population"
Demography, 1971
The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic
The William and Mary Quarterly, 1961