Malthus's Essay on Population: the facts of "super-growth" and the rhetoric of scientific persuasion

For the Malthusian theory of population to be accepted as "scientific," it was essential that the theory be established on wide empirical evidence. A close examination of the "facts" provided by Malthus, however, shows that many of his crucial facts are based on distortions of the available evidence. Malthus was probably aware of much of this weakness, but for rhetorical reasons he persisted with the sandy empirical foundations from which he began.