Population, Pauperism, and the Proletariat: Rousseau, Malthus, and the Origins of the Social Question

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• Dr Chris Brooke (POLIS and Homerton College, Cambridge)
• Tuesday 25 November 2014, 18:00-19:00
• Bamford Room, Homerton College.

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Robert Malthus’ notorious argument in his Essay on the Principle of Population about the tendency of the population to expand at a faster rate than the food supply is often described as the product of an argument he had had with his father Daniel, a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But if we stop thinking about the Essay as an anti-Rousseauist argument and learn to read it instead in terms of a family quarrel (literally!) among different kinds of Rousseauist, then powerful themes come into quite a sharp focus, which help to make historical sense of the transition from the political theories of the eighteenth century to nineteenth century anxieties over “the social question”.

This talk is part of the Homerton Seminars series.

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