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There may, it is true, be no explicit mention of Malthus in Carlyle's two
pieces. But one of his principal, and explicit, targets there, as
elsewhere, was the impersonal "cash nexus" that was, in Carlyle's view,
perverting social and economic relationships in mid-19th century
England--hence his lamentation in these essays of the plight of the
impoverished, often "involuntarily" idle, "Distressed" "white"
needlewomen of London, who would be much better off were they bound in a
"not easily dissoluble," long-term contract. In the hands of Carlyle, Tory
Radicals, Christian socialists, and other assorted groups, such routine
attacks on the cash nexus were synonymous with their criticisms of the
classical economic paradigms of Malthus, Ricardo, and their successors.
The short of it is that Carlyle's virulently racist argument in the two
essays that the "idle" freedpeople of the British West Indies should be
returned to a state of compulsory servitude (in part for their own moral
betterment) was a quite inextricable part of his general criticism of
supply-and-demand free market processes, the involuntary and voluntary
idleness that these processes ostensibly encouraged, and classical
economics' sanctification of these processes.
Jonathan Glickstein
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