맬서스의 『인구론』에 나타난 결핍과 과잉의 정치학

초록

Population has been a highly controversial topic since the age of political economy until today as the number of world population is reaching 10 billion by the year 2050. The growth of population is accounted as a dismal symptom of the apocalypse of humanities because it requires more natural resources that are fundamentally finite. Malthus was a progenitor of casting this kind of pessimistic view on the population by demonstrating how deeply the question of increasing population was connected to the predicaments of the poor in the Romantic Britain. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, which was anonymously published in 1798 and immediately attracted a lot of public contention, Malthus, as a leading political economist then, introduced a fundamental fear of boundless increasing rate of population and its apocalyptic results in the future of the state, saying in his famous population theorem that “population increased in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio.” In this context, this paper examines Malthus’s view on the deficiency of nature, which brings scarcity in economy and the excess of sexual desire, which breeds surplus of manpower in demography. This paper examines Population as reflections of his ideas of political economy on the matter of mathematical imbalance between the power of productions(nature) and the power of reproductions(population). He argued that the later so greatly exceeds the power of food production that population should always be held within the resource limits through two types of checks; positive checks that raise the death rate and preventive checks that lower the birth rate. This article traces Malthus’s fearsome anxiety on the advance of over-population state by studying his two checks through which he dismisses the idea of the Gordwinian utopianism as unrealistic and undesirable for the poor. It was rather fear itself that led those uncivilized savage of the rural England out of their state of nature and to the better living condition in future.

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