David Cannadine thinks about the thoughtful rich
David Cannadine, 24 January 1985
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Faber, 595 pp., £20, March 1984,0 571 13177 8 Show More
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Faber, 595 pp., £20, March 1984,
“... his optimistic view of the future, by de-moralising political economy, and by arguing that the laws of population meant that for most people life would always be nasty, mean, brutish, short, and poor. Only in the second edition of his Essay on Population did Malthus soften his tone somewhat, and tentatively admit that Smith may have been right. But by then ... ”