An Essay on the Principle of Population (The World's Classics). This item is unavailable.An Essay on the Principle of Population (The World's Classics)

As the world's population continues to grow at a rapid rate, Malthus's classic warning against overpopulation gains ever more importance. "An Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798) examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources: better economic conditions lead inevitably to lower mortality rates; poor relief encourages the poorest and most irresponsible to multiply; reproduction exceeds food production. Malthus' argument was highly controversial in its day. Literary England despised him for dashing its hopes for social progress. Today his name remains a byword for active concern about man's demographic and ecological prospects. In this new edition of the essay, Geoffrey Gilbert considers why it was so effective, and ties it to issues of social policy, theology, evolution and the environment.

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.