Malthus and Ricardo's Inductivist Critics: Four Letters to William Whewell

Economists' knowledge of Malthus has been shaped very largely by the extensive Ricardo-Malthus correspondence, now widely known through Mr. Sraffa's edition of Ricardo's writings. In his exchanges with Ricardo, Malthus appears as an insistent realist, countering Ricardo's strong cases with references to specific historical experience, and calling attention to what happens during the intervals ignored in Ricardo's long-run equilibrium analysis.Four substantial letters from Malthus to William Whewell have recently come to light in the Whewell Papers, at Trinity College, Cambridge.2 A reading of them suggests that the position Malthus adopted in debate with Ricardo was one dictated in part by the latter's severely abstract approach to economic enquiry. William Whewell, and the small Cambridge inductivist circle of which he was a member, occupied the opposite extreme to Ricardo in the methodological spectrum. In relation to them, Malthus appears almost as a defender of Ricardo's abstract reasoning. The letters are valuable chiefly for the fresh light which they thus shed on Malthus's methodological stance; though they also contain clear restatements of some of his known views