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Eduard Masjuan and Joan Martinez-Alier Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona International Society for Ecological Economics, Montr

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Eduard Masjuan and Joan Martinez-Alier Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona International Society for Ecological Economics, Montr View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Papers in Economics 23/2004 – UHE/UAB – 17.06.2004 Eduard Masjuan and Joan Martinez-Alier Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona International Society for Ecological Economics, Montréal 11-15 July 2004 “CONSCIOUS PROCREATION” : NEO-MALTHUSIANISM IN SOUTHERN EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA IN AROUND 1900 ABSTRACT One main concern of Ecological Economics is the balance between human population and natural resources. This is rightly named “the Malthusian question” because Malthus predicted that human populations, if unchecked, would grow exponentially while agricultural production (and other land-based productions) would be subject to decreasing returns to the labour input. This article shows that over one hundred years ago, there was in Europe and America a successful social movement that called itself “Neo-Malthusianism”. In contrast to Malthus’ pessimism, it believed that population growth could be stopped among the poor classes by voluntary decisions. Women were entitled to choose the number of children they wanted to have. The movement did not appeal to the State to impose restrictions on population growth. On the contrary, in Southern Europe it was based on “bottom up” activism against governments and the Catholic Church. KEY WORDS Population growth. Demographic transition. Malthus. Feminist neo-malthusianism. Birth control. Anarchism. 1 23/2004 – UHE/UAB – 17.06.2004 INTRODUCTION Many of today’s concerns about the depletion of natural resources and the ecological impact of the increasing population are attributed to a contemporary rise in neo-Malthusian thought. Ecologists who wrote in the 1960s and 1970s on population and the environment such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin embody the historical heritage of the international neo-Malthusian movement. Thus, it is a common place to say that Julian Simon was an anti-Malthusian economist of the late 20th century who saw in a growing population a stimulus to economic growth, while his opponent, Paul Ehrlich, is a noted “neo-Malthusian”. Currently, neo-Malthusianism is identified with economic and political power. Any concern for the imbalance between natural resources and human demography is often suspected of being backed by contemporary neo-imperialism (Rao, 1994). Neo-Malthusianism still arouses much enemity among nationalist movements, many religious churches or faiths, some of the remaining marxists, and even some economists. Malthus himself thought that improving the situation of the poor was useless because it would lead to the exponential growth of their population. The neo-Malthusians of 1900 thought that Malthus was wrong. They believed that, so to speak, poor people could and should take their own demography into their hands, controlling births not by chastity and late marriages or by pestilence and wars, as in the Malthusian scenarios, but by contraception. This was a successful movement. However, there are writers on the environment in Europe, in America and also in India, who ignore the neo- Malthusianism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They entertain a persistent confusion with regard to the history of the debate on population growth and sustainability. Between Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb of 1968, there were many proposals and movements concerned with population and natural resources which cannot be left aside. Malthus’s ideas were adopted but also changed by British, American and European authors and activists who advocated the use of contraception, thus creating a movement known as neo- Malthusianism. They refused the Malthusian choice between starvation by hunger because of overpopulation or starvation of sentiments because of lack of love. They thought that women were 2 23/2004 – UHE/UAB – 17.06.2004 entitled to choose the number of children they wanted to have. They considered that poverty arose from inequality, and not from overpopulation. However a situation could arise in which population would increase faster than subsistences. In Catholic Europe, where both the State and the Church were in favour of population growth, the neo-Malthusian movement attracted activists who were more radical than in northern Europe, often anarchists. In this article, we shall show that there was a strong neo-Malthusian movement more than one hundred years ago that used yet questioned Malthus’s thesis by defending the exercise of conscious, voluntary procreation. We shall also examine the influence of neo-Malthusianism in the advent of the new demographic order in Europe. At the same time, we shall ask why a movement like neo-Malthusianism, linked as it was to anarchism and revolutionary labour unionism, has fallen into oblivion, and why the word “neo-Malthusian” today has an imperialist connotation. THE ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN NEO-MALTHUSIANISM Ever since 1798, when Malthus formulated his essay on population, there arose concerns in his country, England, about avoiding the overpopulation of poor people. The Protestant pastor, who had claimed that there was no relief for the destiny of poor people who unconsciously procreated beyond their existing resources, held that the demographic regulators of the old regime based on war, misery and epidemics, were still valid. The alternative to the Malthusian trap, if there was one, went no further than some puritan advice on moral restraint, that is, celibacy, delay in the age of marriage and sexual abstinence. It took some time for Malthus’s “remedies” to be transformed. In England, the earliest recommendations for restricting working-class birth rates started to circulate through the radical sectors of society in 1822. Francis Place, a tailor by profession and associate of the utopian socialist, Robert Owen, first published in London his work Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, in which he did not yet describe the details of the contraceptive methods which he would later anonymously disclose in his so-called Diabolical Hand Bills. Other personalities followed Place and Owen in the same concern for the welfare of the proletariat, including Richard Carlile (1790-1845), who in 1825 wrote his neo-Malthusian 3 23/2004 – UHE/UAB – 17.06.2004 work entitled What is Love? These and other neo-Malthusian works were republished and broadly disseminated in England during the first third of the 19th century; they had public impact and attracted considerable governmental persecution. Neo-Malthusianism travelled to North America via Robert Owen himself, when he founded his communist-inspired colony, New Harmony. As early as 1835, Robert Owen’s son, Robert Dale, published the neo-Malthusian booklet entitled Moral Physiology in New York, various editions of which were issued until 1877 in both England and the United States. Following this work, Charles Knowlton, a Boston physician, wrote Fruits of Philosophy. Starting in 1854, concern for the condition of the proletariat and high infant mortality rates was spurred by the English doctor, George Drysdale, who published the first edition of his book entitled The Elements of Social Sciences under a pseudonym. This book discussed the much- needed sexual education of the proletariat in order to later voluntarily restrict its fertility. The remedies for overcoming the three evils of poverty, prostitution and celibacy, which the author claimed afflicted humanity, were explained in this work. Drysdale’s work inspired the creation of the first neo-Malthusian organisation in the world, The Malthusian League, founded by his brother, Charles Drysdale, along with Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Bessant, in London in 1877. Starting this year, the rapid spread of contraception gave way to a drawn-out lawsuit involving those who wanted to re-issue the book by the American physician, Charles Knowlton, in England. The case challenged those who backed the publication, Annie Bessant and Charles Bradlaugh, and was discussed in many countries. The creation of The Malthusian League and the Bradlaugh-Bessant trial coincided with the declining birth rates England witnessed since that time, as it is acknowledged by historical demography (Sauvy, 1965: 65). One key factor in the future development of neo-Malthusianism in the rest of Europe took place when at the same time, a member of the council of the First International, Paul Robin, was living in exile in England. His contact with the radical neo-Malthusian English thinkers led him to propose including the issue of population in the programme for workers’ freedom as early as the 1870s, but his calls had no resonance on the international socialist agenda. (1) 4 23/2004 – UHE/UAB – 17.06.2004 Despite this initial lack of understanding, the rapid spread of Drysdale’s work is a fact (2), and the English league’s activities in the United States and England led to the spread of neo- Malthusianism around Europe. This is how, via its own theoretical and practical production, the second independent European neo-Malthusian league was founded in the Netherlands in 1881 under the name De Nieuw-Malthusiaansche Bond, the secretary of which was the physician, Jan Rutgers, who published the newsletter Het Gellukkig Huisgezin (The Happy Family). From its beginnings, this league had valuable support by the member of parliament, M. S. van Houten. There is no indication that neo-Malthusianism was legally persecuted in Holland like it was at first in England, but there were two public morality (re-population) leagues which attempted to combat the spread of neo-Malthusian theories and practices called: Rein Levenbeweging, based in Utrecht, whose mechanism of dissemination was the newsletter Levenskracht; and the Vereeniging tot Bestrijding van het Nieuw-Malthusianisme, based in Gravenhage. In 1889 in Stuttgart, Germany, the neo-Malthusian league Sozial Harmonische Verein was created, the secretary of which was the publicist Max Hausmeister. We do not know whether he was also a physician, although sometimes he appears as such. The league’s means of spreading information was the newsletter Die Sozial Harmonie.
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