Book Description

Thomas Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill dominated the study of the social sciences in the Nineteenth Century. It was Malthus, not Ricardo or Marx, who was the most famous social scientist of the nineteenth century. This fame rested upon his pamphlet, An Essay on the Principle of Population, whose harsh conclusion caused much contemporary concern. However, the essays published in this volume emphasise the theological, moral and historical orientation of his thought and the more positive attitude towards the masses found within his later writings. The breadth and sophistication of John Stuart Mill's life and works is no less stunning now than it was in the nineteenth century. Not only an economist, Mill was also a Benthamite, logician, philosopher, political theorist and belle lettrist. Recent scholarship has reinforced our sense of a thinker whose system of thought as a whole is rich, subtle and basically coherent within its own terms.