The “Secret Concatenation” in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Case of George Poulett Scrope, a Still Neglected Political Economist
研究了19世纪中叶政治经济学家斯克罗普如何提出富人与穷人之间的“秘密联结”理论，强调资本在缓解贫困中的作用，并基于非基督教道德观构建其政治经济学，对经济思想史学者有参考价值。
The phrase “secret concatenation ” is Samuel Johnson’s and refers to the hidden bonds uniting the fortunes of the rich and the poor in com-mercial society. This article explains how the secret concatenation was formulated in the writings of the often neglected mid-nineteenth-century political economist George Poulett Scrope. From a dual dialogue—with the radical critics of inequality and the Malthusian apologists for pover-ty—emerged Scrope’s non-Christian moral theory of the reciprocal in-terest of the rich and the poor, built around a positive defense of the role of capital in alleviating poverty. This theory allowed Scrope to fully integrate an organic paternalism and a utilitarian discourse of rights and duties into his political economy. Although Scrope was far from be-ing the first writer to attempt to unveil the secret concatenation, two features made his version distinctive. The first was the prominent role he accorded to capital and the interrelationship he established between morality and capital accumulation. The second was that his moral theory was erected on an explicitly non-Christian basis. Historiographically, the latter point highlights both a moral alternative to Christian political economy and the existence of a non-Christian providential naturalism in providing the basis for free market ideology.