Henry-James Meiring `Revisiting Darwin’s Malthusian Moment: Annotations from the Archive'

This paper revisits Charles Darwin’s reading of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (6th ed., 1826), which furnished Darwin with the much-needed mechanism of evolutionary change he came to call natural selection. This pivotal moment in the history of science has been extensively written about and yet has been largely misunderstood. As I will show, generations of scholars have been led astray by the influential writings of Robert M. Young as well as by the conceptual and structural organization of Darwin’s archive. It turns out that Darwin did not read Malthus as a political economist, as Young and others have argued, but rather as a “great” moralist. By rereading Malthus along with Darwin, this paper argues that Malthus’s thought was primarily instrumental in the development of Darwin’s moral theory. What follows, then, overturns more than a half-century of scholarship on the relationship between Darwin and Malthus.