Some thoughs about the history of "Philosophy of History" /part 11/

Interestingly, the position of the Russian historian and sociologist Kovalevski in his work "Europe's economic development to the emergence of the capitalist economy" points out that the forms of national economy do not follow arbitrarily but one after the other, and are subject to the famous law of growth of the population. Thus, the development of hunting and fishing in primitive society has its own reason for the existence of large, free land and low population density.

image source

With the increase of population density, the transition to the new way of production, ie. livestock breeding /. Finally, the private property itself, according to him, arises when the population grows even more and is forced to divide the land into plots because it is unable to expand its possessions. In some demographic studies, population density is presented as the most important factor on which cultural life of society depends (not the material!). It's about the so-called. sociometry according to which the cultural level of each nation can be measured by the number of large cities in a country with a population of over 100,000 people. This is because in these cities individuals have the ability to mix and combine through their crosses their qualities in a variety of ways, from which they become more inventive. In this sense, people living in small palaces and villages can not create a high culture.

The second set of supporters of demographic determinism (pessimists) are just the opposite. For her, the growth of the people's population has a negative impact on social development and leads to serious shocks, disasters and crises in the social life of the people. The most prominent representative of this view is the English priest and sociologist TR. Maltos, who at the end of the 18th century published his famous work "Testing the Law of the Population". In it, Maltos tries to reveal the relationship between increasing population density and increasing the means of living. According to him, the growth rates of these two factors are not the same. Population tends to increase in geometric progression while life means in arithmetic. As a result, there is a periodic inconsistency between the number of the population and the available means of life. This appears to be a "superfluous population" that has nothing to eat. As a result, tensions arise in society (increasing crime, disease, epidemics and mortality). That continues until then is considered by Malthus as the number of the population equals the available means of living, resulting in a revival that brings a new peak in the growth of the population, and from there to a new crisis.