The Malthus Effect: Population and the Liberal Government of Life

Author: Mitchell Dean

Affiliation: Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, &
School of Humanities and Social Science,
University of Newcastle, Australia.

Corresponding
Address: Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Copenhagen Business School
Porcelnshaven 18B
Frederiksberg DK-2000
Denmark

Contact: Phone: +45 31444129

Email: mitchelldean.dean@gmail.com

Bio:

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and

Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of

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

contemporary rationalities of government (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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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

populations and the human species.

Keywords: Population, biopolitics, genopolitics, sustainability, security, poverty.

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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

(scurit) of the population and, consequently, those who govern it.

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 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

appropriate to the characterization of key aspects of contemporary styles of governing. To do this, I

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

viewed (Greene 1999, Connelly 2008).

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

biopolitics, geopolitics and environmental politics of the twentieth century. It concludes by

indicating some implications for contemporary governing in and by liberal democracies.

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The Malthus Effect

Foucault contrasts the safety, or sret, of the Prince and his territory to the security of the

population. The formation of the population as a knowledge-domain is thus crucial to his

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)

and the era of governmentality (2007: 109).

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

wealth to political economy (2007: 78).

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

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aspiration had reached, according to recent historians, an obsessive peak precisely during the years

of Foucaults lectures and texts on biopolitics and governmentality.

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

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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

conditions of primitive abundance enjoyed by the savage.

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

temporal continuum (1804: 251).

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 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

centrepiece of classical political economys theoretical demonstration of the economy David

Ricardos theory of rent (1951) - is based on a narrative of the differential productivity of

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

wastes his life in the imminence of death. (1970: 2567)

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

harmonious coincidence of the representation of interests in market exchange predates economics as

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

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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

the population and a bio-economics of scarcity but also a bio-spatiality of territory.

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

expect public charity to do so.

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

for the purpose of two-years general training for colonial administrators.

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

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would be manifest in recurrent and catastrophic events, such as war, epidemic and famine and the

catastrophic form of savage life.

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

populations. Life is anything but incidental to liberal ways of governing.

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

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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

conceptualisation of contemporary forms of governing in and by liberal democracies.

Malthusian moments

It would be difficult to overestimate the range of impacts neo-Malthusian movements and

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

environmentalism. Ronald Walter Greene regards it as a governing apparatus (what later

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

located in international organizations (e.g. International Planned Parenthood) and philanthropic

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.

Poverty latched onto population

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

repugnant or unimaginable to Malthus from intra-uterine devices, manual abortion devices, to

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

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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

argument at the heart of the development discussion of largely agrarian societies.

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

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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

inequalities in place of overpopulation. Nevertheless family planning remained a central element

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

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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

partake the rhetoric of voluntary participation rather coercive sterilization.

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

US money to finance abortions abroad (Connelly 2010: 86-87).

International security through population control

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

of this Committee as beyond proper political or governmental activity or function or

responsibility, it would become a key rationale for American leadership of global family planning

in the next decade.

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.

Population and the birth of modern environmentalism

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

American sense of progressive (Robertson 2012: 130-6).

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

inhabitants and a common destiny (Robertson 2012: 150-1).

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

Carta of compulsory population control (Robertson 2012: 153).

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

access to abortion and contraception, supported as planned parenting initiatives, as a liberation of

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

contribute to the undoing of this political alliance.

A more fundamental critique of environmental Malthusianism was provided by the neoliberal

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

States proposed an internationalisation of labour and capital (against nation-building modernisation

schemes) as a path to economic growth and the demographic transition. It would further seek to

marginalise the environmental wing of the population movement as a form of anti-intellectualism,

in a reprise of the Hayeks Pretense of Knowledge argument, with the blanket characterisation of

population environmentalism as anti-science, anti-technology and anti-material progress (Greene

1999: 211-12).

The neoliberal response to population environmentalism might peremptorily be viewed as the

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

Malthuss principle of population. We mention here only three.

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

deadbeat dad avoiding child support.

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

illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

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

movements and was capable of mobilising millions of activists. Malthusian problematisations of

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

for population control in the twentieth.

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

possible to question the sustainability of the human species itself.

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

as a feature of humans relation to the biosphere, at the intersection of biopolitical, bio-economic

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

places the anticipation of catastrophe at its heart.

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

formation of the early liberal arts of government.

The Malthusian figure indicates a different paradigm of liberal government from that of the

eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment one proposed by Foucault. Rather than a model of

government as tending to a government through interests harmonized by an invisible hand, or

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

entire human species.

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

global problems continue to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable.

30

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