1873 Second Edition. Sm 8vo.  xxv, 354pp, map frontis.   Brown cloth gilt title to spine Corners bumped slight wear to top of spine.

Scrope’s non-Christian moral theory of the reciprocal interest 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 being 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.

George Julius Poulett Scrope FRS (10 March 1797 – 19 January 1876) was an English geologist and political economist as well as a magistrate for Stroud in Gloucestershire.