Qusai Qandeel
Dr. Lynn MacDonald
ECON 478
October 4, 2017
Thomas Carlyle and the Dismal Science
It is known and believed to many that Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher, called
economics “the dismal science” in reference to Thomas Malthus population theory, that gloomy
economist who claimed humanity was trapped in a world where population growth would always strain
natural resources and bring widespread misery, poverty and hardships to life. However, Carlyle’s target
was not Malthus, but economists such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that it was institutions, not race,
that explained why some nations were rich and others poor.
In this controversy Mill defended the abolition of slavery on economic grounds; Carlyle opposed
him, not for supporting Malthus’s predictions about the terrible consequences of population growth,
but for supporting the emancipation of slaves. Therefore, according to this view, Carlyle found
economics “dismal” because of his support to slavery. Carlyle was one of the premier theorist of the
