Rereading Malthus: Darwin and the Historians

This essay revisits Charles Darwin’s reading of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay of the Principle of Population (6th ed., 1826), which furnished Darwin with the mechanism of natural selection. While historiographical debates have centered on Robert M. Young’s Marxist claim that Malthus legitimized the struggle for existence, this essay argues that such accounts have overlooked Malthus’s role in shaping Darwin’s moral theory. Rereading Malthus alongside Darwin, I show that Darwin engaged Malthus not as a political economist but as a “great” moralist. This practice-oriented approach challenges prevailing ideological interpretations of Darwin’s apparent debt to political economy while also interrogating the conceptual and structural organization of the Darwin archive that has sustained these readings. In doing so, it overturns more than half a century of scholarship, calling for a reassessment of both the Darwin–Malthus relationship and the historiographical and archival practices that have shaped its reception.