Philip Connell. Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. ISBN: 0198185057. Price: US$100.

In 1798, a small book was published anonymously that changed the way people thought about the world. It was written in a plain style and it dealt with common-place topics: birth and death, family and childhood, wealth and poverty, superstition and belief. It also made serious and critical comments on eighteenth century philosophy and politics especially the French Revolution. It began with ominous forebodings about the fate of human society, but it concluded with the hope that through patient reflection and imaginative foresight, human beings might be able to change things for the better. The object of some controversy in its day, the book exerted a profound influence over nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. The book is, of course, Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. This book could also, obviously, be Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. That may seem a surprising coincidence. It is widely assumed, as Phillip Connell notes, that “in terms of their intellectual formation, ideological orientation, and perhaps even moral sensibilities, Malthus and Wordsworth were fundamentally inimical to one another” (15). Certainly, Malthus’ population principle, that human population will inevitably outpace food production resulting in poverty, misery, and vice seems to confirm his hard-nosed reputation as the inventor of the “dismal science.” Malthus and the “mechanico-corpuscular theory” (as Coleridge called it) that he stood for were frequent targets of the Romantics’ polemical outrage. But this does not prove that Romanticism is “fundamentally inimical” to political economy. Rather, it proves just how interested in political economy the Romantics actually were and how much that interest shaped their beliefs. Connell debunks the idea that Malthus and the Romantics were ideological and temperamental opposites by outlining in the first chapter the similarities in their educational and philosophical backgrounds. Malthus was born in Dorking, Surrey in 1766. His father was a personal friend of Rousseau and Hume who employed a variety of Rousseau-like tutors to educate his son. Such a “skeptical” upbringing may account for Malthus’ impatience with the optimistic pieties of late-eighteenth-century thought, his belief in the inevitability of mortal suffering, and his faith in statistical evidence and inductive reasoning. All of these traits would become hallmarks of the discipline of political economy through the nineteenth century and Malthus one of its most famous cultivators. Indeed, following the success and influence of the Essay on Population, Malthus was appointed Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury in 1805, the first academic chair of its kind. But Malthus was never comfortable with the narrow “classical” doctrines of political economy that would later be associated with his friend and sometime adversary, David Ricardo. Rather, Connell stresses, “Malthus was clearly working within the eighteenth-century tradition of natural theology associated above all at this time with the Whiggish and latitudinarian tendencies within Cambridge University” (27). He entered Jesus College in 1784, was ordained a Church of England minister in 1788, and matriculated in 1791. His views on natural theology were “unconventional” but not adamantly so. Like Paley, Malthus believed that mortal suffering has a purpose. But he did not believe that this suffering was necessarily a step toward ultimate salvation or, as in Godwin, the spur of human perfectibility. Rather, the distresses of overpopulation and hunger are part of God’s plan to make human beings understand the limits of their bodies and minds and improve themselves accordingly. Given this background, it seems odd to Connell that Wordsworth and Coleridge should be assumed to have dismissed Malthusianism. Malthus’ Cambridge affiliation, doubts about Paley and Godwin, and views on suffering and self-awareness were similar …