Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis.

• Author: McGee, Brian R.
• Position: Book Reviews

Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis. By Ronald Walter Greene. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999; pp. xi + 273; $82.00.

Over the last three decades, journal editors in communication studies overwhelmingly have come to insist that publishable manuscripts produced by rhetorical critics contribute to the development and/or revision of rhetorical theory. This preference for building rhetorical theory has meant in practice that scholarship focusing on specific texts or collections of texts as intrinsically important has largely disappeared from our journals. Happily, in a discipline that has been more focused on journal articles than book publication, a growing number of rhetorical scholars are now addressing a potentially large audience by writing books that emphasize analysis of contemporary public issues more than disciplinary issues of theory development. Ronald Greene's Malthusian Worlds is such a work, and it provides a fine example of the contributions that rhetorical critics can make to larger debates over public policy and social change that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

The scope of Greene's book is impressive, as is his interrogation of the often-obscure texts that have shaped well over a century of dialogue on population concerns. Beginning with the work of Thomas Malthus, Greene traces the emergence of a particular kind of "governing apparatus," the "population apparatus." The population apparatus would both enable and constrain the twentieth-century public policy debate over the population crisis, a crisis that Greene describes as "a complex field of practical reasoning traversed by a host of institutional agents, including international social movements, nongovernmental organizations, academic disciplines, private foundations, advocacy groups, nation-states, and international governing institutions like the United Nations" (p. 2). Relying on the theoretical contributions of a diverse range of scholars-from Chandra Talpade Mohanty to David Zarefsky to, most centrally, Michel Foucault-Greene provides a rich and sophisticated reading of the population crisis that neverthe less is accessible to serious readers from a variety of backgrounds. For Greene the "population crisis exists as a place for judging and intervening into the size and rate of population growth in order to improve the welfare of a population" (p. 3). Thomas Malthus demanded the intervention of a governing apparatus into...