The Improvement of Society: Between Thomas Malthus's Principle of Population and Fernando Pessoa's Malthusian Laws of Sensibility

Description

This presentation explores the parallels between the projects of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and Álvaro de Campos’s “Ultimatum” (1917). In response to the optimistic views of Enlightenment thinkers such as William Godwin and Condorcet, who believed in the unabashed progress of human societies, Malthus analysed what he considered to be one of its biggest obstacles: the principle of population. Arguing that population growth had an inherent tendency to supersede food production, Malthus implied that death, misery and vice seemed inevitable to the human species, thus tying the improvement of society to the resolution of a social problem. His ideas were hotly debated in the new context of industrial Britain and influenced some important political decisions, most notably the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Like Malthus, Fernando Pessoa was also concerned with the improvement of society, but in his opinion one of the most pressing problems had a cultural nature. Through the persona of Álvaro de Campos, he applied the Malthusian principle of population to explain how the plethora of stimuli produced in modern societies, due to the enormous scientific and technological advances of the nineteenth century, had overwhelmed the ability of the human intellect to comprehend them. Contrary to Malthus, who relied on Christian morality to find solutions for the political economy problems of his time, Campos considered Christian ideas and mores the most important factors limiting social improvement, and defended their abolition. This was not simply an inconsequent provocation aimed at the Portuguese society and its predominantly Catholic culture, but rather a way to mobilise it and transform the country.

Period	9 Nov 2016
Event title	4th Congress on Fictionalizations of Science in Great Britain
Event type	Conference
Conference number	4th
Location	Lisbon, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	Regional