Rev. Robert Wallace, 1697-1771.

Edinburgh-educated Scottish philosopher and cleric. 

Educated at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Wallace was a Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland minister in Moffat (Dumfriesshire, southwest Scotland) and later at Edinburgh. 

Robert Wallace is principally remembered for his Dissertation on population, originally read before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh c.1746, but published only in 1753.  Wallace proposed the hypothesis that population was correlated with availability of food, and consequently that nations which focused on agriculture tended to be more populous.  Wallace proposed an explicit natural rate of population growth - calculating that population naturally doubled every 33½ years (p.5).  As that rate was not seen empirically at the time, Wallace surveyed the various current socio-economic conditions (and policies) which kept population growth in check.  Echoing Berkeley, Wallace points to increasing taste for luxury and neglect of agriculture for keeping population growth less than what it might otherwise be (p.19).  He compares the condition of 18th C. Europe unfavorably with the Ancient world.   Wallace's contention that population had declined since the Ancient era was famously contested by David Hume's 1752 discourse, prompting Wallace to append an extensive rejoinder in the 1753 published edition.  Wallace's insights and research on demographics was highly influential on Robert Malthus's theory of population.

In his 1758 Characteristics treatise, Wallace was articulated a latter-day version of Mercantilism and contested Hume's Quantity Theory of Money, arguing the increasing the supply of money could increase industry and wealth. 

Wallace's  sermon on Various Prospects  (1761) is a general lament on the condition and prospects of the modern world.  In an thought exercise, Wallace articulates a remarkably utopian vision of a communistic world without property, geared to happiness and propagation, although he quickly dashes this with a pessimistic prophecy about how even such utopian state of affairs was doomed, as population growth would eventually hit its natural resource barrier, with the resulting Malthusian evils of poverty, famine and conflict.

Robert Wallace was a member of the "Select Society" of the Scottish Enlightenment elite. He was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh..

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