Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “Ricardian vice” to describe a danger inherent in economic theorizing, a maximal case of which he detected in David Ricardo. The danger consisted in the economist yielding to a series of temptations when trying to solve difficult problems in economic analysis: making simplifying assumptions that established spurious causal relations, forgetting non-economic considerations, and then making confident policy recommendations on the basis of an analysis so simplified.Footnote 1 In his account of Ricardo's economics, Schumpeter used the contemporary language of “comparative statics,” “aggregative variables,” “equations and variables” and “model”;Footnote 2 it is not hard for the intellectual historian to spot that this conceptual vocabulary is anachronistic, belonging to twentieth-century economics, not to early nineteenth-century Britain.
Rather than assessing nineteenth-century political economy on the basis of later concerns and concepts, we need to investigate the conceptual vocabulary with which Ricardo and his contemporaries reflected on and appraised a given piece of political economy, if, that is, we wish to understand what concerned them about economic thinking. That is the focus for the investigations that follow. The results suggest that the primary language with which Ricardo and his peers discriminated between good and bad political economy consisted of a cluster of terms linked to a theory/experience topos that had become highly energized following the French Revolution. In this context, the meanings of “theory” and “experience,” and the proper relation between them, were susceptible to extensive linguistic and rhetorical manipulation, and this fact was exploited by a diverse array of writers on both sides of the reform debate. This vocabulary certainly permitted a vice to be detected in abstract thought, especially in Ricardo's. It was not the vice described by Schumpeter, however, but centred on the different issue of theoretical enthusiasm. The essential allegation was that in the course of engaging in theoretical pursuits Ricardo had allowed his mind to be enchanted by its own creations because he had failed to apply the relevant disciplines to his theorizing. To his critics, Ricardo's enthusiasm was an instance of a widespread malady that was closely associated with both speculative reason and political reform.
The crucial linguistic and political context to bring to view is thus not twentieth-century conventions for good model building. Instead, it is the British debate over the French Revolution and the question of political change at home. A contingency that defined this context was that speculative reasoning on politics was identified as a leading cause of the troubles in France, troubles that awoke painful memories of England's experience with new forms of government in the previous century, and this accounts for why the British discussion of French events was so counterrevolutionary and inward in character.Footnote 3 Once the French Revolution was viewed in terms of England's political traumas, the new claims to political knowledge made by political philosophy and political economy could be subjected to attack via the allegation of enthusiasm, which possessed a tremendous historical charge.
It follows that, if we are to speak of a Ricardian vice that has historical purchase, then enthusiasm should be a key component, a concept whose history has recently emerged as central to the Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century history of enthusiasm draws in a number of discourses, surveyed in the invaluable collection by Lawrence Klein and Anthony La Vopa.Footnote 4 An important insight emerging from this collection is that the meaning of enthusiasm was progressively extended to include not only false religious claims but also secular forms of reasoning, especially those trusting in reason to achieve utopian ambitions, as most forcefully expressed in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).Footnote 5 In relation to the early Enlightenment, J. G. A. Pocock has suggested that we should treat the defence of social order from religious disorder as a defining characteristic of multiple regional Enlightenments dating from the Wars of Religion,Footnote 6 and Michael Heyd has described the attention that medical and philosophical discourses gave to investigating the natural causes of enthusiasm in the same period.Footnote 7 Further studies, by Pocock and John Mee, have traced enthusiasm into the early nineteenth century, both as a popular metropolitan culture that periodically alarmed authorities and as a debate over true knowledge amongst the learned.Footnote 8 The present paper thus extends this research by following the history of enthusiasm into a terrain of learned debate where it has not yet been detected, early nineteenth-century political economy.
The essential task for what follows is to situate Ricardo's descriptions of his own method in this linguistic and disputational context, in which the charge of enthusiasm represented a polemical limit because it implied that the propositions in question were nonsense and that rational debate was impossible. The first step is to establish a baseline against which the attacks on Ricardo can be viewed, along with his linguistic choices when defending his arguments. This entails identifying a vocabulary that was common to appraisals of reasoning in political economy and the emerging science of politics. The second step is to then examine two cases of Ricardo's language use when faced with the need to defend himself against the charge of enthusiasm, in which he drew on this vocabulary. One of these cases is Ricardo's exchange with Charles Bosanquet amidst the Bullion Controversy, where Ricardo construed his work as (what we would call) empirically supported. The other is a contrasting case, in which Ricardo responded to the attacks on his treatment of value in his Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation with a different vocabulary, one that did not marshal facts and experience to his side but evinced scorn for lesser (non-theoretical) minds and affected deafness to warnings of the dangers of theory. Seen together, the two cases lead us to locate Ricardo in a debate over reform, theory and enthusiasm, and to appreciate the rhetorical and combative character of his comments, likely at the expense of their value as trustworthy testimony on method.
THE LANGUAGE OF “THEORY AND EXPERIENCE”
In his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), Dugald Stewart complained of the unsatisfactory language that he felt himself obliged to adopt when discussing the prospects for a science of politics. It was to comply with common usage and prejudices that Stewart allowed himself to “contrast theory with experience.”Footnote 9 According to Stewart, this was a false contrast, since theory only ever arose from extensive experience. The unhelpful opposition had developed in response to scholastic writers who rarely felt obliged to use facts when forming theories, and Stewart claimed that this habit had largely been superseded by building on Francis Bacon's foundations for scientific thought.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, the opposition between theory and experience continued to be used in Stewart's time to divide two sets of political thinkers—those who trusted only to established institutions and those who were prepared to reason a priori. As Stewart fairly characterized the two parties: “The former are commonly understood as contending for experience in opposition to theory; the latter are accused of trusting to theory unsupported by experience.”Footnote 11
In these passages Stewart was reflecting on the language used to evaluate political thinking and, as we will see, the same language was also used to evaluate arguments in political economy. The language of theory and experience did not form a part of what we may call the first-order vocabulary. This vocabulary was used to make positive arguments regarding discursive objects, which included such terms as “constitution,” “balance,” and “reform,” or, in the case of political economy, terms such as “labour” and “profit.” Instead, theory and experience belonged to what J. G. A. Pocock has called a second-order language,Footnote 12 which is used to evaluate, attack and defend thinking conducted with a first-order language. Unlike its philosophical counterpart, the historiographical distinction between first- and second-order languages does not name a sharp border but orients the historian to the investigation of combative reflection on contested concepts. In the texts studied in what follows, “enthusiasm” was thus a concept largely formed through the negative appraisal of an opponent's reasoning practices, where the essential problem was that the mind had become intoxicated with its own productions and uncoupled from truth and reality as a result. Most remedial disciplines insisted on the need for the theorist to tether their reasoning to practice, experience and fact.
An early example of this language being used in relation to political economy is Thomas Pownall's A Letter from Governor Pownall to Adam Smith, published in 1776 in response to Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Pownall was the former governor of Massachusetts and a published authority on colonial affairs.Footnote 13 The positive side of Pownall's response was indicated by his claim that Smith's Wealth of Nations offered the materials for a “system that might fix some first principles” and even manage to establish “principia,” in the same manner that “Mathematicks are to Mechanicks.”Footnote 14 The critical aspect of Pownall's assessment is seen in his suggestion that Smith's immersion in learning gave rise to the failings of Wealth of Nations. According to Pownall, while Smith had performed a “philosophic and patient analysis” of the principles that govern society, he had also attempted to “deduce synthetically” via “steps of demonstration” crucial “doctrines of practice” for use in “the world of business,” a dangerous undertaking.Footnote 15
Pownall conveyed the danger by reworking the theory–practice distinction into one between metaphysics and physics, counterposing “theory of metaphysicks” and “practice in physicks,”Footnote 16 and between an “abstract notion” and the “homespun wisdom of our ancestors.”Footnote 17 Pownall then linked theory with the fate of Icarus's lofty flight when he wrote that he would remain within “old bounds of common consent and universal practice” that were “fixed in a real foundation” and refuse to “follow an abstract notion ‘on Dædalian wings through the air’.”Footnote 18 The risk that concerned Pownall was that “some dangerous consequences in practice might be deduced from theory, instead of those sound and beneficial doctrines which derive through experience, by a true analysis of nature and her principles.”Footnote 19
The remedy for these failings was to appropriately combine theory with practice. In his account of money, for example, Pownall claimed to have on his side both “the most refined strictness of abstract reasoning,” along with “fact,” and “the general experience of mankind.”Footnote 20 Here Pownall's concern was to advocate a particular attitude or stance towards thinking with abstract notions, which can otherwise encourage an impetuous use of the intellect—like Icarus's incautious flight. In other words, one needed to impose a discipline on oneself when engaging in theoretical speculation. Pownall thus viewed the testing of theories against fact, experience, practice and nature not just as an epistemological matter but as an ethical discipline, and its function was to protect reasoning from the potential corruptions that were inherent to abstract thought.
Smith similarly identified the statesman's corruption by theory as a harm to guard against, and he discussed it most notably in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in Part VI, which was written in 1789, and hence with regard to both the French Revolution and Jean Alembert's notion of a harmful “spirit of system.”Footnote 21 Smith's discussion began from his account of the sentimental basis for the desire to reform society. The society in which we live will ordinarily have a significant influence on our fortune and the fortunes of those whom we love, and it is therefore a natural object for our selfish and benevolent affections.Footnote 22 With this claim set out, Smith identified two principles that together give rise to love of country. The first was respect for the established constitution, understood as the distribution of powers and interests across the orders of the society, and the second was concern for the welfare of fellow citizens.Footnote 23 Smith held that these two principles were aligned in peaceful times but could diverge in times of public disorder, when altering the constitution might be necessary for restoring peace.
Determining whether society was best served by defending the existing order or by embracing change could be a genuinely difficult question to answer. It was at this point, Smith argued, that the “spirit of system” typically had its most dramatic effects because it acted on our concern for our fellow citizens, and “often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism.”Footnote 24 In this deranged state, men of system became “dupes of their own sophistry,” “intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience,” and will be led to propose drastic change to the constitution and form of government, even if the existing arrangements were recommended by centuries of peace and glory.Footnote 25 Once again, the criticism of abstract reasoning was oriented to correcting an intellectual stance or comportment.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke also detected a dangerous and infectious set of ideas as driving change. The founders of ancient republics “knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate.”Footnote 26 The old legislators acquired a knowledge of the vagaries of human nature in civil life and then distinguished between citizens with reference to multiple characteristics, and only then formed a commonwealth composed of different parts. On the other hand, “modern legislators” simply “confound all sorts of citizens . . . into one homogeneous mass,” and their chief amalgamating tool was the rights of man.Footnote 27 Not only did this notion conceal information that was crucial for the legislator, but it filled people with such “passionate enthusiasm” that they would ignore talk of a constitution “whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience,” for they “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men.”Footnote 28
Thomas Robert Malthus entered the debate over reform with his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), and attempted to alter the terms of reference. He portrayed discussion following the French Revolution as divided over the question of whether or not society was poised for rapid and profound improvement, arguing that hostility between the two sides precluded meaningful discussion. On the one hand, advocates “for the present order of things” treated “the sect of speculative philosophers” as either projecting a happier future only to aid in the destruction of the present order, or as “wild and mad-headed enthusiasts” who merely produced “silly speculations, and absurd paradoxes.”Footnote 29 On the other hand, defenders of the status quo were presented by their enemies as either holding “narrow prejudices” or defending present abuses because their own interests were served by their maintenance.Footnote 30 Both sides allowed animus to divert them from the protocols of good philosophy, and Malthus's role was accordingly to reframe the contest from one between theory and experience to one between good and bad theory.
His first step was to set out strictures on good theory. A “just theory” will be confirmed by experiment, and because “so many minute circumstances occur in practice” experiment is a lesser standard than “the test of experience.”Footnote 31 When it came to the theories of the reformers, experience and experiment were not possible, but as a preliminary they must at least withstand theoretical testing. All “suppositions, the probable realization of which cannot be inferred upon any just philosophical grounds,” would not meet Malthus's standard.Footnote 32 In the first Essay, Malthus used this elusive notion of “just philosophical grounds” to defend a certain role for theory in public argument, while nonetheless maintaining a powerful anti-reform argument. Malthus denied that the radicals (William Godwin especially) possessed a credible theory, and that naive empiricists (Richard Price especially) could arrive at correct conclusions, because in both cases “just philosophical grounds” were lacking. Malthus thereby refused the theory/experience distinction that Burke used against the reformers in favour of achieving similar effects with his own contrast between good and bad theory.
We can now return to Stewart to bring this opening survey to a close. The fourth chapter of his Elements was titled “Of Abstraction,” and Stewart's aim was to establish the principles that should guide this mental operation when forming general principles, and then to justify the role of abstraction in a science of politics. According to Stewart, the Platonists offered an instructive case in how not to use abstract meditation, for they had presented their thinking in such a mysterious form that they perplexed themselves.Footnote 33 A key defence against this danger was to base general principles on “particular objects and particular facts” instead of beginning with general principles.Footnote 34 A further discipline was to apply the results of speculation, since application was a test against absurd results—such as constructing diagrams from geometric formulae—and to use accurate definitions to prevent ambiguity from entering into a chain of reasoning.Footnote 35
In relation to politics, the theorist must abstract away from peculiarities to distinguish between different forms of government, and from here produce general principles by comparing institutions under different forms of government.Footnote 36 But there was no question, wrote Stewart, that such general principles “should apply literally to practice” or could aid the conduct of the statesman without prior “practical and experimental skill,” otherwise the “mere theorist” is exposed to ridicule.Footnote 37 Yet again, the proper use of theory is seen to be a complicated matter involving non-theoretical skills. The point of Stewart's political science was rather like Smith's science of the legislator—to “furnish the statesman with fixed and certain maxims for the regulation of his conduct.”Footnote 38 For, unlike in the mechanical arts, in politics it is not possible to experiment in order to test a conclusion. Further, our knowledge of “political experience” is imperfect owing to the mingling of fact and theory: “very frequently, in this science, when we think we are opposing experience to speculation, we are only opposing one theory to another.”Footnote 39 We will see Ricardo make this same argument against Bosanquet.
Despite these and other limitations around the use of theory in politics, Stewart's message is that it is nevertheless indispensable, and that it will come to play an increasing role in the future due to the forces set loose by the dissemination of Enlightened knowledge. In this mood, he set his sights on the Burkean position that “the art of legislation should be carried to its greatest possible perfection by experience alone,” and that it was foolish to attempt to trade the known benefits of existing constitutions for “the uncertain effects of changes, suggested by mere theory.”Footnote 40 While the danger of hasty innovation was no doubt real, Stewart argued, and while even the best citizens could be “intoxicated with ideas of theoretical perfection,” it was no less dangerous for public tranquillity to tolerate abuses indefinitely in the name of experience.Footnote 41
This indicative account of the debate over the role of theory and experience in reform suggests that, as Stewart lamented, the relationship between theory and experience had become a sharp point of contest. That the stakes had become high can be seen in the fact that advocates of parliamentary reform had found it necessary to shelter their arguments under the “constitutionalist idiom” for protection from the charge of libellous sedition,Footnote 42 and in Emma Rothschild's suggestion that even Smith's political economy had come to be seen as “virtually seditious.”Footnote 43 It is now time to examine if this language was also mobilized to appraise Ricardo's political economy, focusing on the charge of enthusiasm, and to see if Ricardo also worked with these terms of debate, first in the bullion controversy, and then in relation to his theory of value.
THE BULLION CONTROVERSY
In 1797 there was a run on the Bank of England that saw convertibility suspended, the practical implication of which was that a holder of banknotes could no longer demand payment in specie. The more general implication was that the currency's backing by gold was now in abeyance. The fear that this paper currency aroused was that an excessive issue of banknotes would erode their value, and although this did not immediately happen, by the year 1800 the depreciation of banknotes had reached 10 per cent.Footnote 44 The heart of the ensuing theoretical controversy was whether or not the quantity of banknotes in circulation affected prices and the exchange. An anachronistic translation into modern terminology would render the issue as whether or not an expansionary monetary policy causes both inflation and the exchange rate to depreciate. Today's macroeconomics responds with an unequivocal yes, as did those associated with what came to be known as the bullionist position, including David Ricardo.
The debate drew forth Ricardo's first publications in political economy, beginning with a series of letters to the Whig newspaper the Morning Chronicle, which would then be elaborated and restated in pamphlet form as The High Price of Bullion. Ricardo's arguments reworked themes from debates of 1801–4 in relation to the depreciation of Irish currency, and hence they were not terribly original.Footnote 45 Ricardo's interventions did, however, reignite a controversy that would culminate in the formation of another parliamentary committee, one of mixed party composition and genuine talent, including William Huskisson and Francis Horner.Footnote 46 The report that the committee issued in 1810 broadly aligned with Ricardo's analysis,Footnote 47 and called for a return to convertibility within two years despite the fact that Britain was still at war.Footnote 48 As it happened, the recommendation was rejected by Parliament and the return to convertibility would have to await suitable postwar conditions, occurring in 1819.
The Report of 1810 bore minimal marks of partisan agendas and was initially well received in the government press, but a concerted campaign by the government to attack it soon developed, and this included the accusation that party bias against the government was a driving force behind the Report.Footnote 49 Randle Jackson thundered at the General Court of the Bank of England that, despite its service to public welfare, the bank was a target of partisan abuse.Footnote 50 Amidst this polemic, Charles Bosanquet's Practical Observations on the Report of the Bullion Committee was identified at the time as the most intellectually serious defence of the bank's conduct and repudiation of the Report’s findings.Footnote 51 Bosanquet had written earlier in his career on behalf of the sugar trade of the British Caribbean, and was the son of one of the bank's former governors.Footnote 52 The structure of his argument in Practical Observations was first to dispute the propositions upon which the committee rested its theory,Footnote 53 and its handling of evidence,Footnote 54 and then to develop his own account of Britain's recent experience of price increases. This account referenced only the “obvious and ordinary causes,” using the accepted “principles of political economy” as Bosanquet construed them: taxation and cost increases driven by the war accounted for the bulk of the price rises since 1793.Footnote 55 What is central for the argument here is that, despite the fact that he was also engaging in political economy and using its arguments as the basis for evaluating legislation, Bosanquet sought to divide his political economy from that of his enemies by erecting a forceful theory/practice distinction, with his own arguments grounded in practice, facts and experience, in opposition to the untested and enthusiastic theory of Ricardo, Mushet and the Bullion Committee.
Bosanquet's rhetorical offensive began by invoking the maxim in political arithmetic that reasoning by figures was the way to arrive at sure conclusions. Bosanquet intended to do exactly this using the figures provided in the Appendix of the Bullion Report, along with the figures in Mushet's pamphlet.Footnote 56 The advantage of doing so was to base arguments on “facts” and not on “[a]bstract reasoning,” as found in Ricardo's “wholly theoretical” arguments, which had triggered the inquiry and shaped its conclusions.Footnote 57 The problem with theoretical arguments, Bosanquet insisted, was that they were not “brought to the test of experiment.”Footnote 58 In Bosanquet's usage, “facts” and “experience” were closely related: practice is the realm from which experience and facts accumulate. The attack on the Report even went to the extent of claiming that the committee's findings were at variance with the testimony of its own expert witnesses, whose opinions could be found in the Report’s Appendix (thus the report was portrayed as split between its “theoretical” main body and the “practical” Appendix). What was most galling for Bonsanquet was the air of authority that was assumed by the authors of the Report when pronouncing on “speculative” topics, and their deprecation of “the results of practice and the dictates of experience.”Footnote 59 Bosanquet's task was to undermine this confidence by submitting the Report’s “theories to the test of fact.”Footnote 60
Three of the Report’s key propositions that Bosanquet tested in this way were: that the unfavourable exchange was one of the symptoms of a depreciated paper currency, that the extent to which an exchange could be unfavorable is limited to transport costs, and that the price of gold bullion cannot exceed the mint price of gold, unless the currency is depreciated.Footnote 61 Consulting Mushet's tables, Bonsanquet noted that from 1802 to 1808 the exchange was in favour of Britain, and the price of gold was 2.75 per cent above the mint price.Footnote 62 Further, between 1797 and 1799 the exchange with Hamburg was favourable to Britain, at times by 12 per cent—more than three times as much as transport costs.Footnote 63 Finally, between 1764 and 1768, before the recoinage that remedied the poor quality of the coins, gold was 2–3 per cent above the mint price, while the exchange with Paris was 8–9 per cent against London while the exchange with Hamburg was 2–6 per cent in favour, allowing at times a profit of 12–14 per cent by paying debts in Paris with gold from Hamburg. Despite this possibility for profiteering—the mechanism for adjustment according to the bullionist position—the exchange was not rectified.Footnote 64 After adducing further evidence, Bosanquet claimed that it must be concluded that the facts stood against the “intimacy of connexion which the Committee assumes to exist between the course of exchange and the price of gold.”Footnote 65 In other words, Bosanquet adduced facts to contest the claims of the theorists.
With the factual core of the Report shown to be faulty, Bosanquet then developed his offensive on a second front, one that we encountered in relation to constitutional reform: that the abstract truth or falsity of a theory was one issue, but the dangers relating to practical application were another altogether. The theory in question was that an ounce of standard gold bullion would not sell for more than the mint price for the same quantity of gold in domestic currency, unless domestic currency was depreciated against gold, which Bonsanquet described as an “old, and in the abstract incontrovertible, theory.”Footnote 66 It was old in Bosanquet's eyes because it was the same theory that John Locke used when he recommended the recoinage of the late seventeenth century, in conjunction with Isaac Newton, then warden of the mint.Footnote 67 Locke premised that an ounce of silver must be of the same value, regardless of whether it took the form of bullion or coin, and so once silver coin was returned to its full weight, silver bullion would no longer sell at a premium but fall to its mint price. Alas, the price of silver bullion rose and the coins were melted down as quickly as they were milled, making a mockery of the recoinage at great cost.Footnote 68 The issue was not the incontrovertible theory, but the mode of its application, even if by one of the nation's great thinkers, John Locke. At this moment Bonsanquet scored a tremendous rhetorical point when he wrote, “Men of less powers but more practical information foretold to Mr Locke the evils which would follow from the unlimited adoption of his theory,” but their advice went unheeded.Footnote 69 The general issue was that even if the Report’s theories were “abstractedly [sic] true, they are not always applicable.”Footnote 70 Drawing on an argument that Malthus would later use against Ricardo, the trouble with the theory was that it was an “equalising system” that worked perfectly well when it did not encounter “external impediments,” but
when applied to practice, it appears to me like the experiment in vacuo, where all friction, all obstruction, being removed, and the power of gravitation alone allowed to operate, the guinea and the feather descend with equal velocities. The fact is undeniably true under the circumstances of the experiment, but it is true only within the limits of an exhausted receiver, and is, therefore, wholly inapplicable to any of the common purposes of life.Footnote 71
This is a curious moment in the history of economic thought: instead of the analogy with Newton being denied by critics of political economy to take away the discipline's prestige (as is common today), the analogy is granted, but to the same evaluative effect.
Bosanquet denied the truth of the propositions upon which the committee's theory rested, and in their place argued that the increase in prices could be explained perfectly well without averting to causes that were “speculative and undefined.”Footnote 72 He also suggested that the committee was guilty of either erroneously stating its facts, or adducing facts that led to opposing conclusions. The proximate reason for such a flagrant abuse of good reasoning was that the committee's conclusions were not developed on the basis of its judicious investigations but “under the influence of a judgement very early formed.” For evidence Bosanquet pointed to page 2 of the Report itself,Footnote 73 where the reader is directed to keep in mind the divergence of the market from the mint price of gold, thereby salting the evidence.Footnote 74 In this context, Bosanquet was prepared to endorse Playfair's finding on the Physiocrats, “who, not very attentive to facts, have established ingenious theories, and attempted to reduce every thing to a system, on which they reasoned till they became enthusiasts, incapable of appreciating any thing that did not conform to the theories they had laid down.”Footnote 75
In Bosanquet's pamphlet Ricardo was thus faced with the accusation of holding a theory at variance with the evidence because of his enthusiasm, of having been enchanted by his theory to the extent that he would expose the public to its dangerous practical application. Once again, we see that intellectual and ethical comportment were tied together. Ricardo began his response by noting that Bosanquet had averted to the “vulgar charge” that “theorists” only offer untested “speculations.”Footnote 76 His move was to deny this claim by construing the history of the currency as yielding “principles” and “laws” that could act as a test of a theoretical system: “when the principles of a currency, long established, are well understood; when the laws which regulate the variations of the rate of exchange between countries have been known and observed for centuries, can that system be called wholly theoretical which appeals to those principles, and is willing to submit to the test of those laws?Footnote 77 From today's perspective this appears as a strange “test,” but it makes perfect sense when viewed in terms of the debate reviewed earlier, for Ricardo is attempting to move his “theory” under the rhetorical cover of “experience.” In fact, throughout his reply Ricardo's rhetorical choices constantly reveal the attempt to align theory and experience. He wrote, for example, of “a theory which rests on so firm a basis of experience,”Footnote 78 of “a practical illustration of the truth of a most satisfactory theory,”Footnote 79 of “opinions grounded on a just theory, sanctioned by practical men, and confirmed by experience,”Footnote 80 and of claims that contradict both “theory and experience.”Footnote 81
Ricardo's rhetoric guided his argument. The second chapter disputed “Mr Bosanquet's alleged facts,” the first of which was that the exchange had in the past varied by more than the cost of transporting bullion, as noted above in relation to the exchange with Hamburg. Ricardo simply asserted that if these facts were true, then he would have indeed found them at odds with his theory, but because the theory was so well grounded in experience it was not capable of being overturned by “one or two solitary facts.”Footnote 82 Further, the facts themselves were unreliable because they were drawn from Mushet's table, which Mushet himself had acknowledged to be faulty because he had assumed an invariable par.Footnote 83 Even when the corrected figures from the second edition of Mushet's pamphlet were taken into account, Ricardo still pointed out errors in the calculations. What is significant is that Ricardo was willing to submit his principles to the test of the figures when properly corrected, and they showed that the exchange had never been in favour of England by more than 7 per cent, excepting the year of suspension. In this year, Ricardo claimed, the quantity of circulating medium was low, which led to an importation of bullion, as proved by figures for the quantity of foreign gold coined at the mint. Taken together, the event was “entirely conformable with the principle of the Bullion Committee,” not least because it affirmed the committee's suggested remedy of reducing the quantity of circulating notes to raise the exchange.Footnote 84 The manner in which Ricardo is open to what we would call empirical evidence should be marked, as the stance would not be carried through to his defence of the Principles.
Of course, Ricardo's openness to an empirical “test” did not obviate the need for decisions to be made regarding what would constitute a test and how it would be administered. This is seen clearly in his rebuttal of Bosanquet's claim that the mere fact that the exchange was permanently in favour of England showed that imports of gold had no ability to correct the exchange, hence the bullionist theory could be set aside in consequence. Ricardo's crucial move was to re-specify the theory's practical implications. He conceded the point that even when the figures were corrected they still showed that the exchange fluctuated between 4.3 and 5.6 per cent in favour of England. But the principle did not exclude this range because a difference of up to 5 per cent was still within the bounds set by transport costs. Within this limit, a persistently favourable or unfavourable exchange did not invalidate the theory because it applied to the exchanges with all countries; to be invalidated the exchange would need to be persistently unfavourable or favourable with all countries. Spain, for example, imported bullion from its colonies (hence the exchange favoured Spain) and exported bullion to the rest of the world (hence the exchange was against Spain). Returning to the case of England, Hamburg exported bullion to England in 1798 because bullion was in high demand in England owing to the low quantity of circulating material, and once this demand was met the exchange returned to its natural level.Footnote 85 A subsequent fall in the exchange then coincided with the increase of banknotes, more than 11 per cent against England as the price of gold bullion rose more than 10 per cent above the mint price, exactly the correlation that the committee affirmed.
The role of “theory,” according to Ricardo, was to provide the basis for a narrative explanation of numerical movements in the exchange in conjunction with a knowledge of contingent events in international trade. In this sense, Bosanquet must also have used theory, “for theory Mr. B. has just as much as the Committee,” and Ricardo set a high bar for its proof: “To prove any thing in favour of Mr. B.’s theory, it must be proved that the precious metals came in permanently in greater proportion than they went out; not from one place only, but from all places taken together.”Footnote 86 Bosanquet was unaware of the structure of his own theory and the proofs that were necessary to make it superior to the committee's. And with this Ricardo had deployed a constant counterattack used by theorists against those who invoked practice—to suggest that a lack of theoretical sophistication exposed the writer to being misled by first appearances.Footnote 87 Ricardo lampooned Bosanquet for his claim that enormous profits could be made by exporting gold to take advantage of movements in the exchange, for it revealed reasoning simply from figures without considering their accuracy or implications. Indeed, this was exactly the political arithmetic that Bosanquet promised his readers. But it was, wrote Ricardo, “very like a man who is all for fact and nothing for theory. Such men can hardly ever sift their facts. They are credulous, and necessarily so, because they have no standard of reference,” or, because they have no sound theory.Footnote 88 Such limited reasoning even precluded a writer from noticing that their facts were “inconsistent, and disprove one another”; an additional cause was “the power of prejudice” to corrupt reasoning.Footnote 89 This last factor might explain why Bosanquet tested the theory not against the thousands of cases where it held, but only against those two or three where it apparently did not.Footnote 90 Prejudice and vested interests could also corrupt reasoning by closing the mind to evidence, and so they can be seen as the theorist's equivalent accusation to enthusiasm because they also render rational debate ineffective and imply ethical failure.
Ricardo was even able to defend Locke from Bosanquet's attack of having been right in theory but wrong in practice by another act of re-specifying the implications of a theory. Ricardo agreed with Bosanquet that the essence of Locke's theory was that an ounce of silver bullion must be the same in value as an ounce of silver in coin, and that this was the same claim that the committee now advanced in relation to gold. Ricardo differed from Bosanquet by claiming that Locke's theory was not followed, since Locke proposed that only silver be the legal standard of currency and that guineas should pass in payments for their varying bullion prices. Alas, the value of guineas was set above gold's bullion price while silver was set below; the result was that gold became a de facto currency while the silver coins were melted down for their bullion value.Footnote 91 The problem, in other words, was not that theory and reality collided, but that theory was not followed.
Perhaps Ricardo's greatest rhetorical win was to reverse the charge of enthusiasm. It came in the context of Ricardo's response to Bosanquet's own explanation of rising prices as driven by taxation and scarcity. Bosanquet had conscripted Smith's comment that a prince might issue paper money and demand that tax be paid using it, and if the face value of such paper were a little less than the nominal value of taxes to be paid, then the paper might yield a premium.Footnote 92 Bosanquet developed the vulnerable interpretation that this meant that so long as annual taxes exceeded the banknotes in value an over-issue was impossible.Footnote 93 As Ricardo pointed out, this was not quite the idea.Footnote 94 In fact, Ricardo stated that if Bosanquet had inspected the years 1793 to 1797 then he would have discovered that although taxes had increased, the value of notes had fallen.Footnote 95 That is, taxes could rise without an increase in circulation.Footnote 96 That Bosanquet sought to link banknotes and taxation through his faulty appropriation of Smith was “a proof that even practical men are sometimes tempted to wander from the sober paths of practice and experience, to indulge in speculations the most wild, and dreams the most chimerical.”Footnote 97 Ricardo was even prepared to accept this negative characterization of the committee pending the results of an “experiment”: if the bank were to reduce their notes by two or three million for three months and no effect were produced on the price of bullion in the foreign exchange, then the critics of the committee could “boast that the principles of the Bullion Committee were the wild dreams of speculative theorists.”Footnote 98
Not only was Ricardo sensitive to the allegation of enthusiasm, but he was also prepared to use it against his antagonists, and to wager its truthfulness on a practical test. In Bosanquet's hands, the allegation worked alongside an attack on mere theory in which practice and experience grounded the opposing mode of reasoning. The key point to note is that Ricardo refused to accept this disjunction between theory and practice and united them wherever possible, not least by identifying the theoretical component of Bosanquet's arguments and by insisting on the need for theory to guide one's intellectual response to experience, understood expansively to include the historical operation of a currency, numerical figures, and everyday learning. The attack on theory via application, which was seen to operate within debates on constitutional reform, was also repelled by Ricardo, but arguably with less success. The point to which Ricardo does seem insensitive, at least in relation to the bullion controversy, was that the idea of conducting an “experiment” with the nation's currency to decide the worth of abstract principles was precisely the cavalier approach to affairs of state that alarmed Burke and others.
RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES AND THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE
Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation was an outgrowth of his Essay on Profits and shared the same central task: to identify the laws that govern the distribution of produce between labour, capitalists and landholders, with special focus on the relationship between profits and rent. The publication of the Essay coincided with Parliamentary debate over the Corn Laws,Footnote 99 and its main thrust was that restraints on the importation of foreign corn hurt profits and produce. The Principles then developed this basic analysis in relation to further topics, especially taxation. The central premise of both texts was that as increasing quantities of land are taken into cultivation, profits across the entire economy will fall while ground rents will rise, where the latter result is caused by landlords extracting excess profits accruing to non-marginal lands. The politically flammable conclusion was that while the interests of labour are partially connected with capital (because the level of employment rises and falls with the level of capital), the interests of landlords were “always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community.”Footnote 100 In these texts Ricardo adopted a different strategy for framing and defending his work than we have just encountered in relation to his bullion writings. Above all, Ricardo's concern with defending an improvised version of the theory/practice nexus gave way to an unqualified rhetoric of scientific discovery. The task of the political economist was to “determine the laws” that regulate distribution, and while Ricardo acknowledged the contribution of Smith and others to the “science,” he presumed to correct their doctrinal errors and set the science on a firmer basis.Footnote 101
Through the use of simplifying assumptions the question of value was sidestepped in the Essay, but it formed the subject of chapter 1 in the Principles. It was in this exceedingly dense chapter—reworked extensively in the third edition—that Ricardo articulated a labour theory of value. The doctrine of value was identified as the source of errors in political economy, especially from Smith, and the first task that Ricardo set himself was to untangle the topic. Yet Ricardo's arguments on value would draw sustained criticism, and invite the allegation of theoretical enthusiasm. Before turning to those attacks and Ricardo's response, it is necessary to bring to view the rudiments of his investigation of value.
Ricardo's essential claim was that goods will exchange in a ratio determined by the quantities of labour required for their production.Footnote 102 This was a crucial strut in Ricardo's argument because it allowed him to claim that increasing difficulty of production in agriculture would cause profits to fall without needing to explain the actual transmission of labour costs into prices.Footnote 103 Labour theory was thus the means for incorporating the central insight of the Essay on Profits into the expansive new work. Further, by including the labour embodied in capital equipment, Ricardo could also use the theory to account for exchange ratios between industrial goods; “labour” was simply standing in for difficulty of production, whether by human or machine. The complication that Ricardo introduced was to notice the effect of the ratio of fixed to circulating capital.
This is a technical issue, and it is not necessary here to enter into all the details.Footnote 104 The key point is that Ricardo used labour as a way to homogenize what we would call input costs.Footnote 105 Whether a commodity was made with the labour of humans or by a machine, Ricardo could treat both identically by thinking of the machine as simply so much labour expended at an earlier date. The wages paid to workers represented “circulating capital,” while the investment in the machine was labelled “fixed capital.” Thus it did not matter if a hundred units of labour were realized as human labour or as a machine; the output of a hundred units must exchange for the output of a hundred units. Further, by assuming that profits were uniform, Ricardo could claim that a rise in wages would not affect exchange ratios—because they were solely determined by labour inputs—only profits. He assumed, in other words, that profits were simply a residual after wages were paid;Footnote 106 the distribution of produce between capital and labour could change, but the exchange ratios that held between goods would not.
The argument regarding this neutrality of wage changes broke down, however, in the presence of different proportions of fixed and circulating capital. Ricardo illustrated this effect by imagining a situation in which two goods were made, one wholly by human labour and the other wholly by a machine that lasts for a hundred years. After a rise in wages, profits must fall for the good produced by human labour, since profits are assumed to be a residual. Meanwhile, profits from selling the machine-intensive output are unaffected since no labour is employed and so no wages are paid. But, in order to satisfy the condition of equal profits for the production of both goods,Footnote 107 Ricardo applied an annuity calculation to discover the discount at which the machine-intensive output must sell to equalize profits: 68 per cent. To be plain, Ricardo's strict assumptions had led him to the counterintuitive result that the price of machine-intensive goods must fall after a rise in wages. Indeed, in his example the terrific fall of 68 per cent followed a modest rise in wages of less than 7 per cent.Footnote 108 This was the consequence of bringing machinery within the orbit of his labour theory of value. Even if capital could be reduced to just another type of labour, profits and wages could not be reconciled since Ricardo had set them in opposition by defining profits as the residual remaining after wages were paid. Worse, his numerical example in the first edition of the Principles amplified the effect to the farcical extent seen above. Ricardo nevertheless exulted in the results, describing them as enormously important for the science of political economy and overturning “received doctrines,” even those articulated by “writers of distinguished and deserved reputation.”Footnote 109
These findings caused two enduring problems for Ricardo. First, exchange ratios could no longer be explained by reference to quantities of labour alone, for now ratios of fixed to circulating capital also played a role. Second, Ricardo's attempt to find an “invariable standard” was fatally undermined, since any such standard commodity would be produced using some ratio of fixed to circulating capital. Yet Ricardo could never abandon the search, even though he early admitted that “[o]f such a commodity we have no knowledge,” because he held that it was nevertheless “of considerable use towards attaining a correct theory.”Footnote 110
Little wonder that Ricardo was attacked for being a speculative theorist. Joseph Pinsent's pamphlet of 1821 raised alarm that Ricardo's policy of free trade would see national wealth “sacrificed to a theoretical scheme which was never reduced to practice, and, indeed, never existed, except in the imagination of its author and his disciples.”Footnote 111 Similarly, one anonymous reviewer of Ricardo's pamphlet On Protection to Agriculture wrote that his “habits of speculation” had created “powers of vision” that were “so extended as to take in only the outlines and very conspicuous objects of some distant country, and some untried condition of society, which, if they be not altogether imaginary, will certainly never be reached by the present generation.”Footnote 112 Another anonymous reviewer of the same pamphlet discerned that Ricardo's policy prescriptions, if implemented, would “unhinge the whole structure of society” because “the Utopia of Mr Ricardo could only be ushered in by an universal bankruptcy.”Footnote 113 The reviewer added that intellectual dispute was no remedy because “Mr. Ricardo has run mad, and therefore it would be in vain to reason with him.”Footnote 114 These are all familiar complaints from the debate over theory and reform reviewed earlier.
If we now focus on the critical reception of Ricardo's value theory and his purported discovery of counterintuitive price reductions derived from hypothetical situations and stringent assumptions, then we find that the charge of theoretical enthusiasm was made loudly. The anonymous reviewer of J. B. Say's translation of Ricardo's Principles was particularly brutal, writing in relation to Ricardo's “centennial engine” that one is “tempted to whisper into the ear of this wonder-working economist, ‘Pray, Sir, raise the wages a per cent. or two more, and then we shall get the goods for nothing’.”Footnote 115 The cause was said to be Ricardo's “love of theory,” which allowed him to articulate so ridiculous a claim not only as his “sober opinion,” but “in the gravest manner possible, and with the full self complacency of a man who feels that he is striking out lights for the good of society.”Footnote 116 An anonymous reviewer of Malthus's Principles for the British Critic contrasted the judicious way in which Malthus combined fact and theory with Ricardo's argumentation. The critic wrote that “it is the characteristic weakness of Mr. Ricardo, to lay greater stress upon theoretical assumptions, than upon all the facts and experience which have been collected by past generations.”Footnote 117 Their summary judgement of Ricardo was that while he displayed ingenuity, the “absurdity” of his claims was patent, and derived from his “love of paradox and mysticism, his affectation of novelty, and his abuse of words.”Footnote 118 In relation to the last failing, it was said that “Mr. Ricardo perplexes his reader and bewilders himself, by using old words in a new sense.”Footnote 119 Ricardo's paradox and mysticism were illustrated by his “hundred year machine” that established his paradox that prices fall when wages rise. Although the author conceded that Ricardo was circling an important truth in this discussion—that prices fall when profits fall and when fixed capital increases—he complained that it had been concealed by ambiguous language and impossible hypotheses.Footnote 120
A further negative assessment of Ricardo's “curious effect” material is worth considering at greater length because Ricardo discussed this review in his letters, which allows us to notice his response. The anonymous article was published in the British Review, and the writer was evidently familiar with Smith and sympathetic to free trade, and acknowledged Ricardo's success in his earlier writings. Ricardo's Principles was described, however, as containing “more of extravagant paradox and learned absurdity than we have encountered in any similar publication.”Footnote 121 The key failing was traced to Ricardo's intellectual capture by his own theory and his insouciance towards reality: “His reasoning, generally speaking, is seldom found to respect the actual state of things as they appear to the observation of ordinary men who have no theory to maintain, but most commonly turns on a collection of hypothetical cases springing out of his own imagination, and accommodated to his own particular views.”Footnote 122 Ricardo's system was modelled “after his own imagination,”Footnote 123 an imagination that had been “led away by the deceitfulness of his theoretical notions.”Footnote 124 As we have now come to expect, the attack included the claim that the necessary intellectual disciplines required to protect a writer from such pitfalls were absent in Ricardo. Above all, Ricardo's argument was ungrounded in “statistical facts” or “experience,”Footnote 125 and he had “fallen diseased into that condition of the speculative faculties, in which men will not condescend to look at any truth.”Footnote 126 As a result, and just as Bosanquet had argued in relation to Locke and the Bullion Committee, Ricardo's conclusions were “inapplicable to the real transactions and condition of human life,” or “practice.” And, also like Bosanquet's invocation of the experiment performed in vacuo, Ricardo's critic likened him to a mathematician who tries to calculate the time needed for a ship's voyage without taking note of tides and currents.Footnote 127 Ricardo, in short, had fallen prey to theoretical enthusiasm, and his treatise was sad evidence of “how ready men are, in certain circumstances, to sacrifice their good sense to the spirit of theory.”Footnote 128
Perhaps the harshest moment of the review came in relation to Ricardo's illustration of the non-alignment of exchange values with a strict labour theory of value via his example involving the “centennial engine.” The reviewer took issue with the extreme assumptions that were required to produce the result, above all the hundred-year life of the machine and Ricardo's refusal to consider how the owner of the machine and the market might react. The entire analysis was driven by an “absurd kind of hypothetical reasoning” and hence, the reviewer claimed, it could be dismissed as merely “a phantom of the imagination,” or “nonsense.”Footnote 129
Ricardo mentioned the review in letters to Hutches Trower and Malthus towards the end of 1817, writing that “in every page I am charged with ignorance and absurdity,” but the reviewer had made his claims “in an ungentmanly [sic] way.”Footnote 130 Along with this slighting of his antagonist's ethos, Ricardo consoled himself with the fact that Malthus had also been attacked regarding the principles of rent,Footnote 131 and with the notion that his critic had not really understood the topic of rent. That was a dubious claim. The reviewer developed a perfectly serviceable analysis of rent using the principles of supply and demand and averted to Smith for authority, especially Smith's claim that land always yielded rent.Footnote 132 Ricardo's analysis was conducted as—what we could call—a thought experiment in which successive units of land are brought under cultivation and the marginal unit of land pays no rent. The reviewer's complaint was that if Ricardo were to successfully overturn Smith's analysis, then he would need to provide “a positive instance” of land that paid no rent; the reviewer was attacking Ricardo on the basis of “experience,” while Ricardo was working with abstract principles.Footnote 133 Yet Ricardo simply construed this methodological difference as evidence of the reviewer's shallow reasoning. In his letter in reply to Ricardo, Trower encouraged Ricardo to disdain the attack as superficial, insisting that the reviewer had not examined “remote and general effects” because he was incapable of “seeing as far as you do.”Footnote 134
What is significant in these comments is that the desire evident in Ricardo's bullion writings to insulate abstract reasoning from the charge of being “mere theory” has given way to construing theoretical activity as a superior form of intellectual work, as clearly seen in Trower's suggestion above that Ricardo's decisive advantage was the extent of his theoretical vision. Where Ricardo had tried in his Reply to Bosanquet not only to deny the allegation of theoretical enthusiasm but also to use this accusation against his disputants, here he is happy to dismiss his critics as failing to ascend to the heights necessary to truly comprehend an issue. In subsequent editions of the Principles this approach was only amplified, especially in relation to his failed quest for an invariable standard of value.
An awkward fact for Ricardo was that while he was happy to be grouped with Malthus, his colleague was attempting to differentiate himself on precisely the issue of method. In the Introduction to his Principles of Political Economy, Malthus denied the analogy between political economy and the “stricter sciences,” and the consequence was that “the same kinds of proof” were not available for political economy.Footnote 135 Further, Malthus identified the primary cause for differences of opinion in political economy as divergent approaches. On the one hand were the “practical opponents” who “draw too hasty inferences from a frequent appeal to partial facts,” and on the other hand lay those writers who exhibited a “precipitate attempt to simplify and generalize” and then did not “try their theories by a reference to that enlarged and comprehensive experience which . . . can alone establish their truth and utility.”Footnote 136 The reason for the second group's aloofness from experience was that for “minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.”Footnote 137 In the recent bullion controversy, Malthus claimed, this temperament saw one cause isolated as the sole factor, even though it did not account for all the relevant “facts.”Footnote 138 Ricardo recognized himself as the target of this comment in his notes on Malthus's text, but simply wrote that the matter of whether or not gold had risen in value, or paper had fallen, could not be resolved.Footnote 139 In a letter to Malthus regarding the criticisms Ricardo had received in Malthus's Principles, Ricardo simply claimed that his book was not as “practical” as Malthus presumed.Footnote 140 Ricardo was affecting deafness to the complaint of dangerous theory, even in private correspondence.
CONCLUSION: METHOD, OR LANGUAGE AND CONTEXT?
The general thrust of this inquiry has not been to show that Ricardo was an enthusiast, but that he was attacked as one by critics in his lifetime, and that he was aware of the allegation and defended himself against it and even attempted to turn it on his intellectual enemies. This recovery of what Ricardo and his contemporaries thought and the language in which they did their thinking is a different task to assessing Ricardo's economics from today's perspective. The summary report on this inquiry is that the malleable terms “theory” and “experience” and their cognates were central to a cross-cutting debate that operated in ethical and epistemic registers simultaneously, these registers being held together by intellectual disciplines that sought to protect speculative thought from falling into enthusiasm.
“Experience” could be substituted with “practice,” “business,” and other equivalent terms, all of which bore various relations to “experiment.” When positively used, “experience” was coincident with palpable reality, and institutions that developed through experience could be seen as possessing their own self-correcting mechanism, a superior test of truth to theoretical inquiry. The negative image of those who cleaved to experience was of theoretical naivety and the inevitable errors of analyses that did not penetrate past surface effects. On the other hand, “theory” could be positively construed as scientific and analytically powerful, and the theorist consequently emerged as possessing a specialist intellectual equipment that allowed them to see further and deeper into social phenomena. Yet theoretical analysis could be negatively portrayed as inapplicable to concrete problems because it failed to adjust its recommendations for the contingencies of the real world. The strongest attack on theory was to describe it as mere enthusiasm, in which case purported science such as Ricardo's arguments on value were merely the absurd productions of a mind bewitched by its own creations, hence beyond reasoning and needing to be intellectually quarantined. This is the sense of the claim seen above, that “Mr. Ricardo has run mad, and therefore it would be in vain to reason with him.”Footnote 141
By mobilizing English and French historical precedents, enthusiastic thought could be linked with social chaos and disaster, most often foreseen by Ricardo's critics in relation to his suggestion that the interests of landlords were at odds with society's interest. The anti-aristocratic potential of this idea attracted James Mill and other philosophic radicals to Ricardo's political economy.Footnote 142 As Pocock has suggested, the emergence of class as a central category of political thought is one of the defining changes of the period under review,Footnote 143 and Ricardo has a good claim to be the first to have rendered class in economic terms, without reference to legal or moral arguments.Footnote 144 We thus have the perception of a new and dangerous doctrine, one coming to be espoused by a middle class no longer effectively superintended by a higher class—exactly the key elements in Burke's explanation of the French Revolution.Footnote 145 It is thus not surprising to find that political economy was met with the same attack words that were sent against French philosophy.
One effect of placing debates over Ricardian political economy in a context defined by revolution and reform is to reduce in importance an alternative linguistic and intellectual context that is more commonly used to locate Ricardo, in which an opposition between induction and deduction is key.Footnote 146 These terms can be found playing minor roles in the period of political economy surveyed above. We saw that Pownall described Smith as having attempted to “deduce synthetically” the principles of government;Footnote 147 Stewart spoke of political conclusions that were “deduced” and of “extensive induction;”Footnote 148 and Ricardo's fellow theorist of rent, Robert Torrens, wrote that Ricardo “generalizes too hastily, and fails to establish his principles on a sufficiently extensive induction.”Footnote 149 This was the rub of the attack on Ricardo later developed by Richard Jones and William Whewell,Footnote 150 and of the parallel attack that Thomas Babington Macaulay made on James Mill's a priori reasoning.Footnote 151 In all of these cases, however, the epistemic flaws of abstract thought are treated as consequences of a flawed or insufficiently disciplined ethical conduct of the intellect. This point leads us to see that induction and deduction would never be autonomously epistemological concepts because they would always be grounded in some specification of proper intellectual conduct. Similarly, if enthusiasm faded as a negative term around the middle of the century,Footnote 152 such analogues as “unscientific” and “unphilosophical” would continue to mobilize ethical and intellectual disciplines in their negative appraisals, although, one imagines, with less political power.
A second effect of recovering the linguistic context in which Ricardo defended his work is to undermine accounts of Ricardo's method that treat his statements as amounting to theoretical principles. In the cases studied, such statements have been shown to draw on manipulable, ready-to-hand terms, defined by their uses in intellectual contests, and varying depending on Ricardo's contextual needs. The effect, in short, is to emphasize the rhetorical character of Ricardo's statements on method, which makes it harder to treat these utterances as solemn and reliable reflections on the nature of his scientific thought. This should direct attention toward studying the concrete means by which Ricardo produced his arguments in lieu of global characterizations using terms such as “deductive,” “inductive,” “theoretical” or “empirical.”
