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Corresponding
Address: Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Copenhagen Business School
Porcelnshaven 18B
Frederiksberg DK-2000
Denmark
Bio:
Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and
Governmentality: power and rule in modern society (2nd edn, Sage, 2010). His most recent book is
The Signature of Power: sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics (Sage, 2013). His previous
books include The Constitution of Poverty: toward a genealogy of liberal governance (Routledge,
2011/1991), Governing Societies: political perspectives on domestic and international rule (Open
University Press, 2007), and Critical and Effective Histories: Foucaults methods and historical
sociology (Routledge, 1994). He is the editor with Barry Hindess of Governing Australia: studies in
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The Malthus Effect: Population and the Liberal
Government of Life
Abstract
This paper identifies and elucidates what it calls the Malthus Effect from two perspectives: a
genealogical-theoretical one and an empirical-diagnostic one. The first concerns its implications for
Michel Foucaults genealogy and conceptions of modern governmentality. The second suggests that
Malthusian concerns have an enduring presence in recent and contemporary politics. In them we
find a government of life that tethers the question of poverty to that of population, as both a national
and international concern, links biopolitics to questions of national security, and is a key source of
the modern environmental movement. It remains present in areas such as welfare reform and
immigration policy, notions of sustainability, and in the global public health and environmental
movements. It takes the form of a genopolitics, a politics of the reproductive capacity of human
2
The phrase, the government of life, takes us to the heart of Michel Foucaults changing
problematics of power of the mid-1970s. Foucault raised and then quickly dropped the terms bio-
power, or a power over life, and bio-politics, concerning, as he put it, the security mechanisms
[that] have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as
to optimise a state of life (2003: 246). We know that these same phenomena would soon be re-
described in terms of governmentality and the liberal art of government. In a footnote, he says from
now on, biopolitics would be part of something much largerthis new governmental reason,
namely liberalism (Foucault 2008: 22). However, later he argues this governmental reason cannot
be reduced to biopolitics. For, from the perspective of liberalism, these biopolitical problems,
which are characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population, assumed the form of a
challenge (Foucault 2008: 317). The problem of biopolitics from now on is not that of the total
embrace of life by modern power but of how to manage the imperative to optimise life in accord
with the rights of the legal subject and the existence of individual free enterprise.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the government of life reached a satisfactory
formulation in this new problematic of the security of the population. During his lectures of 1978,
Foucault argues that there is a very important change in the eighteenth century, which leads away
from Machiavellis problem of precisely how to ensure that the sovereigns power is not
endangered, or at any rate, how can it keep at bay, with full certainty, the threats hanging over it
(2007: 65). The change is to a completely different problem that is no longer fixing and
demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take placein such a way that the inherent
dangers of this circulation are canceled out. In summary, this shift is key to understanding liberal
governmentality: No longer the safety (sret) of the Prince and his territory, but the security
3
Unfortunately, there are questions as to whether Machiavellis The Prince, at the beginning of
the sixteenth century, and the concept of population at the end of the eighteenth century, can act as
the epochal markers Foucault needs them to be in his characterization of this emergent art of
governing. In this paper I shall address only the population side of the equation (but see Dean
2013: 72-5). The main point of the investigation is not, however, to identify the historiographical
flaws in Foucaults argument, but to develop an analytical framework of the government of life
argue, we need to rethink Foucaults conception of liberal government. By neglecting the paradigm
of Malthus and his concept of population, Foucault missed the opportunity for placing the
government of life at the heart of not only classical but also contemporary liberal governing.
Indeed, at the very time Foucault was lecturing on a liberal government that took population as its
target, the United States and international organisations were in the grip of what Thomas Robertson
(2012) has called the Malthusian moment. This moment gave birth to the modern environmental
movement; within it overpopulation became the prism through which issues of global poverty and
economic development, and concerns as different as national security and immigration were being
The first part of the paper discusses the consequences of a reinsertion of the Malthus Effect
into the genealogy of liberal government (Dean 1991: 87-105). The second sketches the way in
which questions of population and poverty, and reproduction and subsistence, became key to the
4
The Malthus Effect
Foucault contrasts the safety, or sret, of the Prince and his territory to the security of the
characterization of what is novel about the arts of government that emerge from the end of the
eighteenth century. The concept of population was central to his definition of the biopolitics of the
population and its distinction from the anatamo-politics of the body. But it is equally important in
his account of governmentality. The double entry of population as an object of knowledge and a
target of government marks, for Foucault, both the threshold of modernity of the West (1979: 143)
In Security, Territory, Population (2007: 6773), Foucault argues that at the level of its
processes, regularities, customs, and history, population forms a nature toward which the sovereign
must apply reflected techniques of government, and which presents a kind of limit to its exercise of
power. It is in this context that he mentions, for the only time in these lectures, the contribution of
Thomas Robert Malthus in a contrast between the bio-economic problem of population and Karl
Marxs postulate of the class struggle (Foucault 2007: 77). Malthusian is used as an adjective in
the term Malthusian couple in History of Sexuality I (1979: 105). His name does, however, appear
in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970: 257) where, as Foucault now indicates, Malthuss principle
of population, will act as the operator of transformation for the transitionfrom the analysis of
We need to address Foucaults failure to address Malthuss contribution in any depth. This is not
only because Malthus is crucial as a paradigm for the government of life that emerged at the end of
the eighteenth century. It is also because the drive to regulate the growth of population as a global
5
aspiration had reached, according to recent historians, an obsessive peak precisely during the years
From the beginning, that is, from the first of its many editions, Malthuss Essay on the Principle
of Population proposes a bio-economic necessity that will prove to be foundational for both the
science of economics and the practice of government. This necessity lies at the very centre of
humans ontological relationship with nature. Malthus posits an ontologically given disequilibrium
in the laws of life, that is, between the rate of growth of the population and the rate of growth of its
means of subsistence. For him, nature is not in itself niggardly; in fact there is no need to assume its
absolute limits. Rather, it is because the power of population being a power of a superior order, the
increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of
subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the
greater power (Malthus 1982: 76). For Malthus, the problem of scarcity is radically distinct from
the one found in Foucaults rendering of the Physiocrats, which is a problem of letting supply and
demand for grain be adjusted by the processes of the market (2007: 41-2). Malthuss problem, by
contrast, is that of a fundamental conflict between humans and nature within a confined space that
necessarily leads to war, epidemic and famine, or more broadly, vice and misery. Economics, in
this respect, as the science of ends and scarce means, has always been a science of humans place in
the biosphere.
This has important implications for the notion of the event. The event is not only, as in
Foucaults lectures, an aleatory and contingent occurrence that can be dealt with at the level of the
regulation of quasi-natural processes, e.g. the way that scarcity is dealt with by the fluctuation of the
supply of grain according to price. The event, in this catastrophic form, is inscribed within
Malthuss principle of population and it is the implied in the disequilibrium of human procreative
6
power and the power of the growth of the means to support life. This results in the hardships of
savage life (1804: 22 ff.) of the Indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas and the Pacific,
which Malthus finds described in the writings of explorers and colonists. This savage life is
characterized by the idleness and indolence of the improvident savage and the strange and
barbarous customs including the violent and cruel treatment of women, the infanticide of
children, murderous war and cannibalism, and susceptibility to epidemic (1804: 1536). A key
cause of war here is the movement and appropriation of land and territory in a hunter-gatherer
society. As Ute Tellman has shown (2013), the savage life is a kind of permanent manifestation of
catastrophe resulting from its immediacy, enjoyment of temporary abundance, and lack of
procreative restraint and consideration for the future. The other manifestation of the event at the
heart of the principle of population is the condition of domestic poor, who would procreate without
sufficient foresight as to the resources the means of life necessary to support their offspring,
particularly when given to expect the certainty of public welfare, and without sufficient regard to
the industry required to procure this subsistence. In fact, public poor relief recreates the
The first component of the Malthus Effect is thus a biopolitics of the population defined by the
intertwining of a general concept of the life of the human population with singular forms of life: the
savage life of the native, the improvident life of the indigent poor, the industrious life of the
independent labourer, and the civilised life the latter makes possible. These singular forms of life
are arranged on a temporal continuum so that while savage and civilized life co-exist in the same
present they do so in different temporalities: one trapped in immediacy, the other oriented to
futurity; and pauperism, or the indigent life, depending on poor relief, is one of the great causes
which render a nation progressive, stationary, or declining, thereby threatening its position on this
7
The second component is that the principle of population does not remain an ideal horizon or
supposition but enters into the constitution of political economy and of economic government. The
increasingly less fertile lands brought into cultivation by the principle of population. This means
that ontological scarcity enters the premises of classical political economy. The laws of life are thus
a condition of possibility of the economic knowledge, which, as Foucault argues, is the key
dialogical partner of governmentality. But the notions of population and scarcity here are quite
different from the ones Foucault found in the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. Quite inexplicably,
Foucault, in his later lectures, seems to have forgotten his own findings in The Order of Things
when after linking Malthus and Ricardo he emphasizes precisely this difference:
Homo conomicus is not the human being who represents his own needs to himself, and
the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who spends, wears out, and
In other words, the homo conomicus of classical political economy is not the homo conomicus as
subject of interest so central to Foucaults narrative of the emergent liberal art of government. The
a science. The latter, instead, would be founded on a notion of production, or the toil and trouble
which spends limited human life on increasingly infertile lands in confined space.
So a second component of the Malthus Effect will indicate the relationship between the
biopolitics of the population and what might be called a bio-economics of scarcity. A third
component, following Alison Bashford (2012: 102), is that this struggle to produce or secure
resources concerns land, space and territory. As she puts it, for Malthus population determinants
8
were in the end about land and spaceThere was a permanent struggle for room and food, and he
might well have called the struggle for living space Lebensraum. Rather than the emergence of
population replacing territory, the very notion of population, as enunciated by its most famous
progenitor, was inextricably linked to the appropriation of land and the establishment of territory.
For example, Malthus wrote against the right of exterminating, or driving into a corner where they
must starve of Indigenous populations. Yet he advised that if the United States continued its
increase in population, the Indians will be driven further and further back into the country, till the
whole race is ultimately exterminated, and the territory is incapable of further extension (1804: 5).
Rather than a movement from territory to population in the art of government, we have a triad of
human fertility, scarce resources and confined space. So not only does Malthus mark a biopolitics of
But the Malthus Effect does not simply remain at the level of discursive practices; its fourth
component is its relation to the emergent liberal arts of government. This has two sides, one
concerning domestic, the other colonial, government. First, Malthuss view of population provides a
programmatic ideal for the reform of those practices that encourage the population to increase
without regard to its means of subsistence, namely poor relief, in both England and in France
(Poynter 1969; Procacci 1978, 1993; Dean 1992). In this respect, the Malthus Effect is central to the
definition of the proper and gendered form of life of the property-less poor (Dean 1991). This is
incarnated in the independent labourer who is governable to the extent that he is made to take
responsibility for himself, his wife or the mother of his children, and his children, and who cannot
In its second side, Malthuss role in the liberal-colonial art of government is also noteworthy
(Bashford 2012: 99102; Flew 1982: 14). There are Malthuss extensive references to the lives of
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the savages found in the accounts of their voyages by Cook, Vancouver and Laprouse and the
reports of magistrates and colonists. But the circle between theory and practice is completed with
his appointment to the first British chair in political economy at Haileybury College (Professor of
General History, Politics, Commerce and Finance), established by the British East India Company
Whatever assessment is made of its continuing impact, scholarship in recent decades has
established that Malthuss principle fundamentally reshaped earlier notions of population (Dean
1991), entered into the conditions of emergence of classical political economy (Tribe 1978), and
thus the earliest economic science, set certain key parameters for the transformation of poor relief
and philanthropy in more than one national context (Poynter 1969; Dean 1991; Procacci 1993), and
was instrumental in the training of colonial administrators (Bashford 2012). For our purposes, it
indicates a political economy in a tte--tte with a liberal art of government (2007: 251) very
different from the one Foucault proposed in his governmentality lectures. In fact we have two
paradigms for the liberal art of government. Next to one that sought to govern through the subject
of interest, or free subject, we have an art of governing (applied to the poor, the indigent, the
pauper, the native, the savage) that sought to govern through the civilized life of prudence, or a
subject capable of foresight and futurity, and that brought that subjects procreative and labouring
body, its concupiscence and restraint, fertility and infertility, lassitude or industry, and capacity for
or lack of foresight, into play. In one a free subject hoping to better its own condition; for the other,
a responsible subject, living confined in space, limited in resources and burdened by its fertility, and
spurred by the fear of avoiding a slip into misery. Alongside a form of knowledge of the natural and
necessary regularities of the market that presented a limitation on government and worked through
the pursuit of self-interest could be found a science of the economy in which a fundamental scarcity
10
would be manifest in recurrent and catastrophic events, such as war, epidemic and famine and the
Foucault was right to consider liberalism a governmental form concerned with its own limits.
But it is also one all too aware of external limits presented by the laws of life themselves the
limits of resources, of subsistence, of space, of what might be called bio-capacity, or what will
soon be called carrying capacity. One of the analytical advantages of the second paradigm of
liberal governing for our present purposes is that it shows that liberal governing is founded on a
conception of life, that economics is already a science of life, and that the stakes and the objectives
of a liberal government concern the various and differentiated forms of life found within
There is a broader argument to be had about the continuing eminence in the present of such
decisive moments identified by genealogy. For our purposes, the principle of population stands as a
paradigm in Thomas Kuhns second sense of the term as a shared example or exemplary past
achievement that can work in the absence of explicit rules (1996: 175). It is a paradigm for a
particularly pervasive form of the government of life for over two centuries. And whether that
government of life fits within a strict definition of the word liberal, it is practised by and within
liberal-democracies, and by political progressives who consider themselves liberal. Indeed it stood
as a paradigm in this sense for both economics and evolutionary biology. Both Ricardo and Darwin
claimed it as such: one as exemplary of processes that provided an explanation of rent; and the other
regarded it as exemplary of the constancy of a struggle for existence (e.g. Darwin 1958: 120). As
such it stands among the conditions of emergence of the theoretical demonstrations of the economy
and of the theory of evolution, and at what might be called a point of indistinction between
economics and biology. Further, it places anticipatory logics of government in the face of imminent
11
catastrophe at the core of the genealogy of the government of life. For our purposes, Malthuss
principle of population stands in relation to the government of life in the same way the Panopticon
could be said to stand in relation to modern techniques of surveillance or the camp in relation to
the treatment of those denied citizenship by nation-states, that is, while it doesnt exhaust governing
life, it remains exemplary of certain aspects of it and indeed makes their development possible.
None of this should be taken to imply that the concept and discourse of population remains
constant through the succeeding two centuries. It should be noted however that population
undergoes key changes even in the nineteenth century. The notions of species, individual variation
and environmental impact involved considerable mutation in the concept of population in Darwin,
social imperialism, and later in Galtons eugenics (Rose 1985: 65-8). Nevertheless, a paradigm does
not preclude innovation; it is in fact what makes it possible. Malthuss doctrine remained an
acknowledged exemplar for both Darwin and Wallace, and a point of reference for Galton on the
question of the effects of the delay in marriage and procreation (Rose 1985: 65, 79).
Malthuss principle of population is a site of innovation with key epistemic and governmental
effects in the nineteenth century. To bring the Malthus Effect into our genealogy of governmentality
is to recast how we might think about modern governing more broadly. We now turn to the narrow
question of Malthusianism over the last half century and the broader question of the alternative
Malthusian moments
arguments had throughout the twentieth century in areas as diverse as national social policy,
international development and aid, birth control and family planning, national security and
immigration concerns and post-1960s environmentalism. Historians of the recent past have
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approached Malthusianism in different but largely complementary ways. Thomas Robertson (2012:
4-7) regards it as a set of fundamentally pessimistic arguments about population and resources,
linking geographically diverse populations in concerns about food production, birth control and
technology, which was decisive in the shift from the older conservation movement to modern
Foucauldians might call a dispositif of population) which links reproductive conduct and
population and resource dynamics across diverse spaces within a network of expertise (1999: 4-5).
For Matthew Connelly (2008: 9-10), it is a transnational network and movement of experts often
bodies (e.g. Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), and including birth control activists and some
prominent feminists, that exercised a kind of imperial biopower over poor and often racialised
peoples. While taking inspiration from these historians and recognizing the complexity of the
question, the current paper regards Malthusianism as a paradigm for the recurrent problematisation
of human fertility and procreation given limited resources and confined spaces. Three key themes
are population and poverty, population and national security, and population and the environment.
After Malthus, population would be irrevocably linked to poverty. By posing a fundamental relation
between the growth of population and the means of its subsistence, Malthus ensured a link between
population growth and poverty, the latter defined, in what would later be called absolute terms, as
the condition of those who lack the means necessary for their physical survival. The key
transformation that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century was that this link was no
longer simply a matter of national but of international concern. After the Second World War,
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population was no longer imagined and addressed within nations but across them (Hodges 2010:
120).
We have noted that colonial government was among the conditions of Malthuss principle of
population. By the second half of the twentieth century, concerns with overpopulation became the
moral framework and language in which governmental programmes would seek to control poor
people globally in their most intimate relations and through birth-control technologies either
sterilization. While eugenics and Nazi race-hygiene policies are undoubtedly the apogee of the
monstrous side of biopolitics, we should not neglect the question of global population control in the
1960s and 1970s and especially in places like India (Hodges 2004).
The route by which this occurred would in the first instance appear to marginalise Malthusian
concerns. In the United States a varied coalition of forces comprising nativists calling for
immigration restriction, advocates of eugenics, the birth control movement and population scientists
founded the Population Association of America in 1931 (Greene 1999: 43-6). However, within a
couple of decades, demography was established as an empirically based academic discipline and a
rift opened between population scientists and popular writers on population. As fertility rates in the
United States and most Western nations declined during the Great Depression, demographers turned
their attention to the differential fertility rates of the West and the rest. One key finding of this
comparative work by the 1940s was the theory of population growth called the demographic
transition (Greene 1999: 47). This theory would connect fertility rates, population growth and
economic development. As the latter occurs, death rates decline and continue to do so with
advances in medical care and public health. Some time latter so do birth rates. As reductions of
death rates become harder to achieve, the birth rate again approaches equality with the death rate
14
and a more gradual rate of growth is re-established with, however, low risk of mortality and small
families as the typical pattern (Coale and Hoover 1958: 13). Birth rates are now the result of the
sum of voluntary decisions rather than custom and tradition and may fluctuate depending on
circumstances, and thus approach the situation of those developed countries. Eugenicists and
nativists had been marginalised and demography entered a new alliance with development.
Malthusian concerns with the control of population also appear to be relieved if economic
growth rather than the control of population was the long-term solution to global poverty. However
by the time of the first United Nations conference on world population in Rome in 1954, the
demographic transition encountered the demographic stumbling bloc (Greene 1999: 68-9).
Consider that in the demographic transition thesis there is no specification about what occurs during
the temporal lag between declining death rates and declining birth rates. It could now be argued
that the spatial and temporal dynamics of modernisation, whether fostered by Western aid or not,
would outpace the speed by which low-income nations could absorb additional population and thus
act as a retardant on economic growth. The population problem was no longer the aggregate rise in
national or even global populations but concerned the population growth rate in what would be
called underdeveloped and later less developed nations. The problem of population would be
based on a spatial distinction (between North and South) arranged on a temporal continuum of
development. According to Coale and Hoover (1958: 17), this reintroduced the classic Malthusian
Contemporaneously, Philip Hauser (1958: 13-14) argued that most students of population in
Western countries had adopted a neo-Malthusian position that sees reduced rates of population
growth as essential aspects of long-run social and economic advances in the densely peopled
agrarian societies of todays world. Just as Malthus had introduced a distinction between those
populations living in the immediacy of the present and those capable of such foresight to plan their
15
families, the tethering of population to development distinguished between those for whom
reproduction would be voluntary and those whose reproduction was fatally embedded in custom
and tradition.
There would be different permutations of the demographic transition and stumbling bloc
theorems in the following years. The latter would become an argument for population control
through family planning as a condition of economic development, particularly during the Johnson
administration in the United States and following a focus on the causes of the Indian Food Crisis of
the mid-1960s (Greene 1999: 77-83). Two broad political forces could be discerned: the newly
formed coalition of Asian, African and Latin American nations, the Group of 77, which linked
problems of economic development to problems of colonialism and its hangover; and the United
States and the capitalist West on the other. (As we shall note in a moment, there is also the absent
presence of the Soviet Union and its allies in this development debate). The two forces entered into
conflict and compromise in the years between the World Population Conferences in 1965
(Belgrade) and 1974 (Bucharest) leading to the World Population Plan of Action. The Belgrade
conference had witnessed the insertion of family planning into development discourses and by 1974
the United States had become the world leader in the distribution of family planning services. On
the other hand, the Plan of Action sought to reassert the primacy of economic development over
population control, and reclaimed the demographic transition thesis and the primacy of global
even in economic development-first strategies and served not one but two functions. It would
unlock economic development by lowering the birth rate and thus population growth; but it would
also be a means of cultural change. This term encompasses the idea that the subjectivities of people
in less-developed countries needed to be dis-embedded from custom and tradition so that they
would be capable of making their own choices about family size. Population control would be
16
conducted through the autonomous choice of subjects, with the proviso that certain populations
must first learn how to exercise such choice. In this sense, even the most drastic measures tended to
These were not simply the plans and programmes of a transnational elite of policymakers and
activists. They had material consequences and took technological forms. The number of men and
women subject to officially voluntary sterilisation during the final year alone of Indias Emergency
period (a twenty-one month state of emergency from June 1975) has been put at 8.3 million, under a
program of sterilisation camps overseen by Sanjay Ghandi and funded by the central government
(Haub and Sharma 2006: 14). When faced with evidence of the unexpectedly high rates of
complications associated with devices such as IUDs, international policymakers and planners
advised that it was necessary to think in terms of mass distributions rather than in terms of
individual patient well-being (Johns and Fairchild 2011: 99). And if we follow the technology, we
find that the mass produced plastic manual abortion device (the manual vacuum aspirator)
promoted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the early 1970s
had its experimental prototype developed in China in the 1950s in rural medicine often practised
without electricity or adequate medical personnel (Murphy 2010: 73). Moreover, some feminists
advocated the use of the same device as breaking the medical professions monopoly over womens
bodies in the West. And its mass production led Senator Jesse Helms to seek to prohibit the use of
By the second half of the twentieth century what was at stake might be described less as the security
of the population than the creation of national security through international population control.
Influential advocates in the 1950s had already linked population, poverty and communism, but it
17
was only in the next decade that this could be identified as an explicit strand in US public policy. As
the United States ventured deeper into Vietnam, biopolitics and geopolitics came to be intertwined.
Next to the pursuit of peace, said Lyndon B. Johnson in his 1967 State of the Union address, the
really great challenge of the human family is the race between food supply and population
(Robertson 2012: 85). Or as James Reston in the New York Times put it a few years earlier: it may
be the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but
sexual energy.
Robertson (2012: 85-91) observes that by the 1960s overpopulation in Asia, Latin America and
Africa had become identified by US policymakers as the cause of poverty and poverty as the source
of communism. They argued that, in its international competition with the Soviet Union and with
China, the US could not afford to lose ground and allies in the Third World. Most influential was
the 1954 pamphlet by millionaire activist Hugh Moore who had taken inspiration from the post-
Second World War writings of William Vogt and Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendells
Population Roads to Peace and War. Invoking the Nazis Lebensraum, Moore argued that
population growth fuels human consumption and hence scarcities which in turn leads to aggression
and warfare. In the immediate post-war period Moore saw this international competition for scarce
resources as a struggle between capitalism and communism and presented a chart that purported to
show the links between population growth and the strength of communism.
Arguments such as these reinforced and provided a mechanism at the heart of the powerful
domino theory which claimed that the fall of one small state would lead to the fall of adjacent
ones (e.g. in South-East Asia) and could eventually lead to the fall of larger, capitalist states such as
Japan. This theory justified US military intervention in small states from Laos to Nicaragua. As
early as 1951, one report argued that should Burma, Thailand and Indochina fall, with them would
18
go a large part of the normal food supply of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Indonesia, Japan and the
Philippines (Robertson 2012: 89). A failure to address rising populations would soon land
communism on Americas doorstep or, as the Draper Committee final report in 1959 put it,
population limitation in the Third World would restrict opportunities for communist political and
economic domination (Robertson 2012: 91). While President Eisenhower denounced the findings
responsibility, it would become a key rationale for American leadership of global family planning
Greene argues that the political containment of the Soviet Union was an important factor in how
the United States came to a position of leadership in the worlding of Malthus (1999: 112). The
strategy of containment in Greenes rendering exemplifies what we have earlier called a bio-
spatiality of territory as well as a bio-politics of population. In respect to the first, it links the health
of the United States to the prevention of revolutionary pathologies in the periphery, which had
their source in the population crisis of the Third World (Greene 1999: 149). The revolutionary
pathologies threatened US security by offering openings for the Soviet Union or by portending a
war between the rich centre and populous periphery. In regard to a biopolitics of the population,
this strategy of containment contributed to making the US the world leader in the promotion of
family planning programs in the Third World in the years 1965 to 1972.
Malthusian concerns with global overpopulation were a condition of the formation of the modern
environmental movement in the United States and elsewhere from the 1960s. As dissonant as this
might sound to contemporary ears, the environmental concerns that crystallised in the first Earth
19
Day in the United States (April 22, 1970), in which some twenty million people would participate,
was closely aligned with the population question (Robertson 2012: 2-3).
A ready exemplar of the environment-population nexus is the 1968 work of Stanford biologist
Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb. The main argument of this book was that the root causes of
virtually all contemporary social, economic and environmental problems were overpopulation and
accelerating population growth. Its prologue spoke of the cancer of population growth that must
be cut out in the face of imminent famine and eco-catastrophe (Ehrlich 1978: xi-xii). The
political sponsor of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson, placed an article by Ehrlich called Eco-
Catastrophe in the Congressional Record the same month as that event (Robertson 2012: 3).
Ehrlich viewed his diagnosis of the need for immediate control of the worlds population as
consistent with his own early support for the civil rights movement and the conservation concerns
inspired in part by Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, and presented as self-consciously liberal in the
For Ehrlich, the crucial link between the population and the environment was contained in the
notion of carrying capacity, a term with a long genealogy. This term formed the bridge from
political economy to the environment. It was first formulated by Belgian mathematicians, Adolphe
Quetelet and Pierre Verhulst, in the 1830s and referred to the maximum population a specific area
could maintain under given conditions (Greene 1999: 160). Its genealogy includes Verhulsts
sigmoid curve of population growth based on fruit flies, through the development of
biodemography, to Vogts bioequation of C=B:E, where carrying capacity (C) is the ratio
between biotic potentials (B) and environmental resistance (E) (Greene 1999: 160-2). Long
before the late nineteen-sixties, then, the notion of carrying capacity made possible the link between
the growth of the number of human beings and the global environment. As Erhlich summed it up in
20
a 1967 speech: This planet is a spacecraft with a limited carrying capacity (quoted in Robertson
2012: 150).
The metaphorics and spatial imaginaries of the new movement are indeed telling. Ehrlich was
not the first to use to expression population bomb. In fact, it was the title of Hugh Moores 1954
tract, which had argued that population growth was as dangerous as the explosion of the H bomb
(Robertson 2012: 89) and which by 1966 had gone into its thirteenth edition. Another was a line
illustration of the Earth almost completely covered with people, either clinging onto it or falling off
into space, which was used widely to promote Earth Day (Robertson 2012: 3). The metaphor of
Spaceship Earth, no doubt alluding to both the space exploration and the new images of the Earth
from space also shaped the idea of the Earth as a vessel with limited resources, increasing
While we should not overestimate the importance of Ehrlichs book, which would sell over two
million copies, it belongs in a genealogy that includes popular post-war works by Vogt and
Fairfield Osborn and the advocacy of the Director-General of UNESCO, Sir Julian Huxley (Greene
1999: 161-5). Neither was Ehrlich alone or the most extreme of his contemporary environmental
Malthusians: that honour is probably due to University of California-Santa Barbara biologist Garrett
Hardin whose essay in Science, The Tragedy of the Commons, represented a philosophical
defense of coercion so influential, especially in environmental circles, that it was called the Magna
Ehrlich marks two important challenges to the existing articulations of the population dispositif:
the primacy of development as the long-term solution to poverty and the reversal of the axis of
problematisation toward the wealthy, white population. Ehrlich did this by arguing that the
demographic transition would be achieved at the cost of creating more high-consuming affluent
21
populations like those in the West who already co-opt much more than their fair share of the world
wealth of minerals and energyand because they have exceeded the capacity of their environments
to dispose of their wastes (Greene 1999: 183). Besides, the demographic transition only portended
slowing growth rates that would still be catastrophic and Ehrlich argued, and continues to argue, no
growth rate can be sustained in the long run (1978: 8, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2009).
The need to control population and the sense of the radical limits of resources and consequent
environmental problems united, for at least a brief time, mainstream political debate and radical
social movements. The Democratic and Republican administrations of Johnson and Nixon
embraced US leadership of global population control in the form of family planning. The nascent
environmental movement viewed zero population growth as a key to protect the environment (ZPG
itself became a fast growing wing of the environmental movement). Late 1960s feminism viewed
women from compulsory motherhood. However, as these historians narratives again point out, this
broad alliance would soon be subject to challenges: from African-Americans who viewed the focus
on population control as genocidal policies directed toward racial minorities; from feminists who
now advocated reproductive autonomy and empowerment against the medical control of womens
bodies entailed in zero population policies; and by anti-colonialists who viewed the environmental
Malthusians as another example of the imperialist targeting of poor, non-white populations of the
South, particularly women, by affluent white, Northern, male experts; and finally by those who
would point out that there were very different classes (first class for some, steerage for many)
aboard Spaceship Earth. These progressive forces would join with conservative ones: religious
groups, including the Roman Catholic Church, who opposed all forms of artificial contraception,
and anti-abortionists in the United States. No doubt also, the attempt to retool the message,
particularly by Ehrlich, to focus on white, affluent populations and thus deprive the bourgeois
22
body of its rights to procreation as a mark of cultural distinction (Greene 1999:180), would
thought collective (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) and particularly the Reagan administration during
the 1984 Mexico City conference. Friedrich Hayek had already singled out the Club of Romes
Limits to Growth report as a form of pseudo-science in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for
Economics in 1974 (1978). At the 1984 conference, the United States argued that population growth
was essentially a neutral phenomenon and that often population growth was an essential element
in economic progress (Greene 1999: 212-13). The real villain was economic statism or
governmental control of economies which distorted patterns of incentives and rewards and led to
localised crises of economic growth (Greene 1999: 209). Consistent with the Structural Adjustment
Policies that were the condition of access for indebted nations to capital at the same time, the United
schemes) as a path to economic growth and the demographic transition. It would further seek to
in a reprise of the Hayeks Pretense of Knowledge argument, with the blanket characterisation of
1999: 211-12).
end of the story for the Malthus Effect and as a definite dissociation of population concerns from
(neo-)liberal forms of governing. However, this is not the case. In the years after the United States
intervention at Mexico City, we witness a number of surfaces of emergence that bear the mark of
23
The first concerns population and sustainability. This was first publicly aired in the report of the
1987 Bruntland Commission, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Greene
1999: 217-19). The idea of sustainable development emerges as a kind of mediation between three
vectors and set of forces: the pro-development strategies associated with the non-aligned
movement; the US-led focus on a neoliberal regime of capital accumulation; and the
environmentalist problematic of population growth. This becomes clear in the 1996 Report of the
Presidents Council for Sustainable Development under Bill Clinton. In a sense sustainable
development is already a possibility in the Spaceship Earth image borrowing as it did the ideal of
an ecologically sufficient and technologically efficient space capsule (Hhler 2013: 21).
Second, there is the relation between population and welfare reform. Malthusian concerns re-
emerge on their home ground, that of the government of poverty. From the 1980s, what would be
called welfare reform seeks to target expenditures on social welfare, to transform public and
centralised provision into more market-like, local and partnership forms, and above all to transform
the character and the conduct of those who receive public support (Soss, Fording and Schram
2011). Welfare dependency was targeted in OECD approaches to the active society (Dean
1995). In the United States the landmark legislation was the 1996 Personal Responsibility, Work
and Reconciliation Act, which attacked a culture of entitlement that fosters a culture of poverty
and an underclass. Here we witness the continued and intensified focus on the reproductive and
childrearing features of the lives of the domestic poor and the claimed encouragement given to the
poor to procreate by their belief in an entitlement to public relief. In the United States this entailed a
particular focus on the welfare mom as a term that condenses a racialised and gendered
conception of poverty at the heart of these problematisations. Ironically, at the very moment that the
political imaginary was no longer haunted by a population bomb, Malthus returned home,
particularly in the United States, to help policymakers rediscover the central problems of the poor in
24
the way welfare fostered a tendency to have children out of marriage and to absolve the
responsibility of the fathers of those children, the complement of the welfare mom being the
A third case is that of the relation between population and immigration. In the early twentieth
century, biological Malthusians such as Lothrop Stoddard produced a demographic panic about
race suicide and national degeneracy (Greene 1999: 232). At the end of the twentieth century racial
Malthusianism had been replaced with a cultural Malthusianism such as found in Lawrence
Austers The Path to National Suicide: an Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism (1993). Here
a new discourse of national degeneration, stripped of its overtly racial themes, is elaborated in
relation to the Third World immigrant who is liable to procreate faster than the host population and
dilute national culture and identity. This leads to such things as the loss of a common language, the
demonization of white men and the promotion of victimhood. It overwhelms the capacity of
institutions such as public schools and police, and results in the effective loss of U.S. sovereignty
to foreign-based criminal gangs in places like New York Citys Washington Heights and the
murderous interracial conflict in major cities, as exemplified in the L.A. riots (Auster 1993: 7). At
the same time, Green Malthusians, such as Virginia Abernathy (1993) were arguing that migration
increases the fertility rates of not only immigrants but also those populations who remain at home.
Such an argument virtually repeats Malthuss opposition to emigration from Great Britain in the
nineteenth century as bringing only short-term benefit and encouraging those who remained to have
earlier marriages and more children. At the very conjuncture at which neoliberals would criticise
the environmentalist critiques of development on population grounds, the problem of population re-
emerges in a racially profiled biopolitics that seeks a disciplinary regulation of the domestic poor
and the introduction of hard containment and increased policing of sovereign borders aimed at
25
The Malthusian concern with population as the unstable equilibrium between its growth and
environmental resources has thus demonstrated a remarkable persistence over more than two
centuries. Since its enunciation by Malthus at the end of the eighteenth century to combat theories
of human perfectibility found in Godwin and Condorcet, it has shown a capacity to take on different
political, epistemic and normative guises. At one point in the second half of the twentieth century it
united both major political parties in the United States with nascent progressive and feminist
the worlds population presided over the birth of the modern environmental movement. In the
nineteenth century, Malthuss principle was a paradigm for both political economy and evolutionary
biology; in the twentieth, for bio-demography and systems ecology. Population growth, or
overpopulation, has been regarded as a cause of virtually all social, cultural, economic, and
environmental ills, as central to modernisation and development, and as fundamentally neutral. The
regulation of population, whether termed population control or, later, in response to feminist and
postcolonial critiques, reproductive health (Rao 2004), has been a key way of identifying and
implementing necessary cultural change among national and international poor peoples, and as a
key to development strategies. The Malthusian thematic has taken anti-statist forms in relation to
the abolition of public poor relief in the nineteenth century, and national statist form in the demand
Conclusion
Foucaults notion of genealogy rejects the purity of origins but emphasizes the conditions of
emergence of a particular figure, whether the clinic, the prison or indeed the liberal art of
government. In respect of the latter, we can say he identifies a paradigm or an exemplar that
continues to shape how we might think about the continuities and distinctiveness of the art of
26
government today. But we have found here a second paradigm of liberal government, which has the
government of life at its very core. Here we have a governing which is not concerned to govern
through a freedom found in a civil society but to make responsible the bearers of concrete forms of
life in the face of the eternal and natural order of life itself, in which economics is not a check on
the optimisation of life but its very rationality and means, and which is made operative not by the
harmonious pursuit of self-interest but the imminence of catastrophe arising from humanitys place
in the biosphere. The second paradigm makes it possible to follow the arc of a genopolitics. The
term in this case would not refer to the genetic basis of political behaviour, but the way humans
reproductive choices and acts as individuals, as populations, and as a species, are attached to
political, economic and ecological objectives and aspirations. From the second half of the twentieth
century, human beings would take the future shape and extent of the entire human species on the
planet as an object of governmental concern. On the basis of this genopolitics, it would now be
Population concerns have not disappeared from the global environmental and health agendas.
As Johns and Fairchild put it: The delicate subject of unbridled human population growth in the
developing world and how the international community might seek to reduce it is inching its way
back into global health discourse (2011: 98). They cite new security arguments that unchecked
population growth in poor countries leads to a glut of young men thereby increasing the probability
of bloody conflict and environmental ones that purport to solve Indias ecological overshoot by
the only known solution of population control. Economist Jeffrey Sachs (2008) has recently
reproduced demographic arguments for rich countries to encourage population control among those
such as sub-Saharan subsistence farmers. In the UK the broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David
Attenborough, has become patron of a population control lobby group. Population Matters, and
gained some notoriety by declaring that human beings are a plague upon the Earth (Gray 2013).
27
More broadly, Connelly contends that the politics of the population crisis forged a kind of
template for other global crises, such as the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the climate crisis (2011: 87). In
each case, he argues, a global problem is said to require a global solution, beginning with new
institutions that can represent all humanity. Individuals are made to police themselves according to
new global norms, though with very different implications for different kinds of people. We can
say that Malthus identified a form of governing that places the imminence of the catastrophic event
and bio-security concerns, and that has acted as a paradigm for governmental innovation for over
two centuries. Today, the catastrophe constitutes an extremity, a tipping point; if there is a
continuum on which it can be located, the tipping point is one stop before annihilation and
extinction (Aradau and van Munster 2011: 5), but for Malthus humanity always already exists at a
kind of tipping point brought about by the fundamental disequilibrium of population and food
resources. The economy is less likely to be thought about as a set of natural processes than as a
complex system (itself sometimes modelled on ecological systems as Friedrich Hayek had first
proposed [1967]); there are new limits to life on the planet, not simply of the means of subsistence
but of the very sustainability of life itself. Solutions or responses are likely to be couched in terms
of precaution and anticipation rather than foresight, although prudence, thrift and hard work remain
among the virtues attributed or denied to individuals and nations. And populations are still exhorted
to control their reproduction. Yet, this early Malthusian paradigm demarcates the fuzzy space and
blurred lines between biology, ecology, economy and the art of governing specific forms of life, and
My argument here is not that we should ignore the elements of a complex genealogy of which
Malthus is only one, albeit key figure. Rather, Malthusian concerns are a paradigm for a liberal
governing that places the government of life at its centre; one that looks forward both ways to
28
economics and biology but exists at a point of indistinction between the two. My conclusion, which
is an entirely unexpected result of this investigation, is that Foucault fails to reach an understanding
of the contemporary government of life precisely because he neglects its paradigmatic case in the
The Malthusian figure indicates a different paradigm of liberal government from that of the
through the freedom of subjects found in a natural-historical civil society, we have a government of
life that connects a general order of life to its singular forms, that seeks to govern potentially
responsible subjects living in a confined space or territory, burdened with a procreative and
labouring body, condemned by their fertility and facing unremitting toil. It seeks to govern through
foresight and responsibility, rather more than autonomous choice, and it seeks to make-up subjects
and populations who can exercise that foresight and bear that responsibility. Today, individual acts
of procreation have been made to bear responsibility for the sustainability of the planet and the
If we take seriously the Malthus Effect in the formation and continued operation of liberal ways
of governing, the latter can not simply be characterized as a governing through the beneficent
effects of the pursuit of self-interest but rather as a form of governing within limits, and under the
tragic shadow of the recurrent and imminent event, of the catastrophe that is always a kind of bio-
catastrophe. One of the most enduring legacies of the liberal government of life to contemporary
governing is our inability to think and act outside this catastrophic framework and logic in regard to
not only environmental questions, but also public health concerns, economic crises, social policy
29
and immigration. We should be vigilant about what happens when the burdens of solutions to these
30
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