Malthus at mid-century: neo-Malthusianism as bio-political governance in the post-WWII United States

Abstract

This paper provides a discursive history of neo-Malthusianism in the United States, focusing primarily on the mid-20th century. In the process, I critically examine texts invoking Malthusian arguments in relation to the politics of sex and birth control, class and eugenics, and race and geopolitics, focusing on how they rendered human population growth intelligible in particularly reductive and naturalistic ways. The purpose is to show how this history impinges upon the construction of population-resource theory after WWII, focusing specifically on William Vogt’s Road to survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our plundered planet. I argue that the production and circulation of generalized models of population-induced conflict in the post-war United States was an important part of the nationalization and government harnessing of science in the name of national security, and relevant to post-war developmentalism and early Cold War containment doctrine. This helps us understand how neo-Malthusian discourse has been deployed as a form of bio-political governance.