Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T18:22:55.101Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond Malthusianism: Demography and Technology in John Stuart Mill's Stationary State*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Robert Kurfirst
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his evaluation of the major social reform movements of his era, Mill chastised well-meaning reformers for their reluctance to elevate Malthusianism to a position of prominence in their efforts. He was convinced that the key to the material, mental, and moral improvement of the poor and the workers lay in a reduction of their physical numbers and in the behavioural modifications entailed by such a diminution, whereas most other reformers looked elsewhere for solutions. A favourite assumption about the proper means for effecting social reform was that economic growth served as an effective and almost automatic instrument for improving society. Then, as now, an unquestioned faith in the capacity of a progressive economy to stimulate gains in per capita income for the lower classes set the terms for the discussion.1 However, by suggesting that broader and more intensive economic development without a corresponding reduction in the rate of population increase would not generate material gains for those living in indigence, let alone the broader socio-cultural progress that was to have followed closely upon its heels, Mill casts aspersions upon the ‘false ideal’ of economic growth which informed many grand programmes for social progress.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , May 1991 , pp. 53 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was presented at the Canadian Learned Societies Conference, Université Laval, Sainte-Foy, Québec, in June 1989.

References

1 The adjective ‘progressive’ is employed here to denote an economic system in which all three of the indices of economic growth identified by Adam Smith in Book One of The Wealth of Nations—capital accumulation, population increase, and labour productivity—are advancing. Similarly, the distinction between the ‘progressive’, ‘stationary’, and ‘declining’ states of society follows that made by Smith in Chapter Eight of Book One, ‘Of the Wages of Labour’.

2 Mill, J. S., Principles of Political Economy, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1965Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, iii. 758.Google Scholar

3 Principles of Political Economy, CW, iii. 719–32, 752–7.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., iii. 719.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., iii. 755.

7 Ibid., iii. 719–20.

8 Ibid., iii. 720.

9 Ibid., iii. 720. Mill elaborates as follows: ‘The increase of profits, being the effect of diminished wages, is common to all employers of labour. The increased expenses arising from the necessity of a more costly cultivation, affect the agriculturist alone.’

10 Ibid., iii. 721–2.

11 Ibid., iii. 723. Mill adds that ‘rent does not gain all that profits lose, a part being absorbed in the increased expenses of production’.

12 Ibid., iii. 723.

13 Ibid., iii. 729. The case of technological progress in manufactures is treated in conjunction with Model Four and found capable of producing an increase of rents relative to profits ‘if the ultimate effect of the improvement is an increase of population’ (iii. 728).

14 Ibid., iii. 729, 730.

15 Ibid., iii. 732.

16 Ibid., iii. 732, 731.

17 Ibid., iii. 730.

18 Ibid., iii. 722. Mill explains that ‘the labourers not being more numerous, and the productive power of their labour being only the same as before, there is no increase of the produce; the increase of wages, therefore, must be at the charge of the capitalist’.

19 Ibid.

20 See Hollander, S., ‘The Wage Path in Classical Growth Models: Ricardo, Malthus, and Mill’, Oxford Economic Papers, xxxvi (1984), 200–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Principles of Political Economy, CW, iii. 725.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., iii. 727–8.

23 Ibid., iii. 724–5.

24 Ibid., iii. 725.

25 Ibid., iii. 756, 757.

26 Ibid., iii. 753–4.

27 Ibid., iii. 756.

28 Bobbins, L. C., The Theory of Economic Development in the History of Economic Thought, London, 1968, p. 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Principles of Political Economy, CW, iii. 756–7.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., iii. 755.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., iii. 756.

35 Ibid., iii. 758, 763, 765, 767.

36 Ibid., iii. 764–5; ii. 108. The last phenomenon, increased trustworthiness, is discussed not in the ‘Futurity’ chapter of Book Four, but in a chapter entitled ‘On What Depends the Degree of Productiveness of Productive Agents’ earlier in Book One (CW, ii. 100–15).Google Scholar

37 Ibid., iii. 765–6.

38 Ibid., iii. 755.

39 Ibid., ii. 226.

40 Ibid., iii. 758, 765.

41 Ibid., iii. 759. In the ‘Futurity’ chapter of Political Economy, Mill characterizes the existence of a ‘leisured class’ as ‘a great social evil’. In his opinion, ‘a state of society in which there is any “class” which is not labouring’ is neither ‘just’ nor ‘salutary’. The only individuals to be exempted legitimately ‘from bearing their share of the necessary labours of human life’ are the handicapped and the infirm—‘those unable to labour’— along with the retired—‘[those] who have fairly earned a rest by previous toil’ (CW, iii. 758).Google Scholar

42 Ibid., iii. 765.

43 Ibid., ii. 395.

44 Ibid., ii. 395. In his 1840 essay on Coleridge, Mill observes that ‘cultivation, to be carried beyond a certain point, requires leisure’, an asset which in the contemporary state of affairs ‘is the natural attribute of a hereditary aristocracy’. In ‘The Negro Question’, his 1850 response to Cariyle, he opposes a ‘gospel of leisure’ to Carlyle's ‘gospel of work’ and maintains ‘that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour’. See Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, CW, x. 124Google Scholar, and Essays on Equality, Law and Education, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1984Google Scholar, CW, xxi. 91, respectively.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., ii. 375.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., iii. 792.