Essai sur le principe de population

In the early 1790s, the English philosopher William Godwin set out a “principle of population.” Responding chiefly to Godwin’s thesis, Malthus published the first edition of his Essai sur le principe de population, a pamphlet issued anonymously in 1798. In 1803 he replaced it with what was intended as a more scientific treatise, in which he also drew on four other major sources: David Hume’s Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, Robert Wallace’s A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, Richard Price’s Observations on Reversionary Payments and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Two years after this edition, the Essai was partially translated by the Swiss scholar Pierre Prévost, professor of physics and philosophy at the University of Geneva. Some chapters were translated in full, others only partially. Prévost accompanied his translation with his own notes and commentary; encouraged by Malthus, he published in 1809, in Paris and Geneva, this new edition — the first complete one — based on the last edition established by Malthus in 1807 (the fourth English edition). “[Malthus] accordingly authorized me to make such changes as I judged necessary. I have not abused this permission. On the contrary, I have made it my rule to present Mr. Malthus’s work as he himself published it. The appendix is the only part in which I have made cuts and some modifications, without indicating them in detail, because the objections the author discusses there sometimes seemed to me too weak or too particular to deserve being set out and refuted in a translation at the same length as in the original. But I have omitted certain passages and even entire chapters that depart somewhat from the main subject or relate too directly to England.”

“The Reverend Malthus’s Essai caused, in 1798, a genuine ideological shock in an England in crisis, traumatized by the French Revolution. This text contains the first formulation — unchanged in the five subsequent editions — of the principle of population. A fundamental advance, this principle holds that the rates of growth of population and of subsistence are very different, the former increasing faster than the latter.” (INED, preface to the 2017 critical edition). His analysis of crises of overproduction set him against Jean-Baptiste Say and made him a precursor of Keynes — through the emphasis he placed on insufficient demand — Keynes himself calling him “the first of the Cambridge economists.”

A rare first French translation of this major landmark in the history of ideas.
A good copy.

From the library of Antoine Larue, with bookplate. Head of several chemical-industry companies in the latter part of the twentieth century, his library was dispersed in 1985 and again in 1993, at the Hôtel Drouot, by Claude Guérin.

Printing and the Mind of Man, no. 251 (for the original 1798 English edition); Kress, B, 5591.