Definitions in Political Economy with Index to the Works of Malthus

The definitions in the Definitions in political economy occupy very few of the book’s pages. It is difficult perhaps to gauge the readership for which Malthus intended the work: the definitions themselves might have been intended for the boys in his classes at Haileybury, setting out basic concepts in a clear and precise manner, but most of the work is taken up with a discussion of the use and more particularly the misuse of various of those basic terms by other writers in political economy – the French economists, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill and J. R. McCulloch. Much would have been familiar from arguments in his earlier works on political economy, although with a number of these he was taking on adversaries who had published more recently.