Synopsis
The provocative historical work on social economy, demography, and population control. Malthus' life's work on human population and its dependency on food production and the environment was highly controversial on publication in 1798. He predicted what is known as the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease. He significantly influenced the thinking of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and his theories continue to raise important questions today in the fields of social theory, economics and the environment. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Book Description
Published in two volumes, these books provide a student audience with an excellent scholarly edition of Malthus' Essay on Population. Written in 1798 as a polite attack on post-French revolutionary speculations on the theme of social and human perfectibility, it remains one of the most powerful statements of the limits to human hopes set by the tension between population growth and natural resources. This is the two volume set.
About the Author
THOMAS MALTHUS gratuated from Cambridge and settled in Hertfordshire as a lecturer in history and political economy at the East India Company College. Among his many works, An Essay on the Principle of Population was the most sucessful and most outrageous. He boldly opposed popular Enlightenment ideals of the 18th-century.
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An Essay on the Principle of Population
Seller: Crappy Old Books, Barry, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardback. Condition: Good. An Essay on the Principle of Population is one of those books that has spent more than two centuries making people deeply uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that it has either touched a nerve or arrived far too early to be invited back to dinner. Thomas Robert Malthus, with the buoyant optimism of a man attending his own funeral, set out to explain that populations tend to increase faster than the food supply, and that this, regrettably, might lead to famine, misery, and a general shortage of cheerful assumptions about human progress. In other words, this is not a feel-good classic. It is not The Wind in the Willows . It is not even one of those old books that pretends things will be fine if everyone simply applies themselves and keeps a stiff upper lip. Malthus peers at society and says, in effect, that nature has rather strict rules about arithmetic, and that sentimentality does not count as agricultural policy. It is bleak, clever, influential, and the literary equivalent of someone calmly explaining over pudding that civilisation may have limits after all. What makes the book so fascinating is that Malthus has become one of those rare thinkers whose surname turned into an adjective. To be ?Malthusian? is to be accused, depending on who is speaking, of realism, pessimism, cold-heartedness, or simply knowing how numbers work. His ideas haunted economics, social theory, public policy, colonial thinking, environmental debate, and countless arguments about scarcity, class, poverty, and whether humanity is a brilliantly adaptive species or just very good at overshooting the buffet table. Agree with him or not, you are dealing here with a book that did not merely join the conversation but barged in, overturned the furniture, and stayed for centuries. This 1973 J. M. Dent edition has the particularly satisfying air of a serious reprint for serious readers, from that noble publishing tradition in which difficult, foundational texts were issued without apology and with the apparent assumption that ordinary people might wish to wrestle with them on a train. It belongs to that fine mid-century habit of making intellectual trouble available in sober covers. There is something reassuring about that. If society must be told its prospects are mathematically constrained, at least let it be in a nicely produced hardback or paperback from a reputable house. As a copy sold by Crappy Old Books, this one comes in Good condition, which feels somehow fitting for a work so concerned with limits, pressure, and the stern realities of existence. It has survived the demographic storms of the modern world well enough, and now waits patiently for a new owner who may approach it out of curiosity, historical interest, economic masochism, or the quiet desire to own a book capable of alarming an entire dinner party merely by lying face-up on the coffee table. And really, that is part of its charm. This is not just a book; it is a portable argument. A compact historical device for introducing tension into any room. It asks whether abundance can last, whether optimism has boundaries, and whether humanity has ever been quite as in control of its fate as it likes to imagine. Light holiday reading it is not. But for anyone drawn to the grand old classics of doom, policy, and impolite arithmetic, An Essay on the Principle of Population remains an impressively austere delight. A masterpiece of intelligent gloom, and a splendidly unsettling addition to the Crappy Old Books shelves. Seller Inventory # 6059
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An essay on the principle of population
Seller: Gebrauchtbücherlogistik H.J. Lauterbach, Gummersbach, NRW, Germany
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Hardcover. Condition: Gut. Leinen mit Schutzumschlag XXXIV, 284 S. ; 19,5 cm. Sprache: Englisch, Zustand: Gut, eher ungelesen (Innen); Einband (Außen) hat min. bis geringe Gebrauchsspuren; Obere Außenecke des Deckels u. Kapital sind gering bestoßen; Kopfschnitt in Grau; Schutzumschlag (hat leichte Gebrauchsspuren); * Die Photos sind original von uns erstellt worden, u.a. erkennbar an einem kleinen weißen Stück Papier im oberen Schnitt. Ab und an verwenden Suchmaschinen Verlagsphotos, bei den Portalen selbst, werden aber nur unsere Originalphotos gezeigt. Seller Inventory # 440029