4 December 2025

9:00 AM – 9:45 AM

Salle Proudhon

Patrice Bouche

Patrice Bouche is a lecturer in British Civilization at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University in Besançon, and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Research (CRIT). He focuses primarily on the analysis of British economic and social discourse in the first half of the 19th century. To date, he has published two articles on Malthusian thought and others on British “women economists” of that period. In 2021, he co-edited a book on The Place of Women in Public Space, 1800-1939, Great Britain, Ireland, Empire.

Is “overshooting the Earth” a new Malthusian threshold?

With his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus laid the foundations for liberal economic thinking around the idea of a natural limit to population growth. According to him, the population tends to grow faster than the available food resources, until it causes a crisis, before falling back to a lower level. His theories were strongly criticized because they seemed to justify the inequalities inherent in the capitalist system. Malthus’ opponents pointed out that, according to him, the poor had “supernumerary” children because the production of goods and the reproduction of the workforce were determined by market forces. Over the last two centuries, the idea of a “Malthusian threshold” has seemed to be disproved: the world’s population has grown rapidly and the “Green Revolution” has ensured its food supply. However, while each country has pushed back its own production limits, the massive exploitation of natural resources now confronts us with another frontier: the absolute limit of the planet’s capacity to sustain this growth, which we are in the process of exceeding. Since Malthus identified the constraints on growth within the very framework of capitalist development, can we not now question the relevance of his analysis in the face of the environmental crisis resulting from this model of development?