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• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Economics and Ideology: Aspects of the Post-ricardian Literature
• I: Political Economy
• The Classical Model of Political Economy
• Modernization, Ideology, and Economic Freedom
• Individualism Vs. Collectivism?
• The Industrial Revolution and Literacy
• Parliamentary Enclosure and Uprooted Labor
• Smith's Critique of Monopoly
• Ricardo and the “dual Development”
• Ricardo On Money
• Inflation and Political Crisis: Germany
• Inflation and Unemployment
• Government and Inflation: the Mccracken Report
• II: Concepts of Liberty
• Liberty and Its Components
• Is the Right to Freedom Vacuuous?
• Liberty, Slavery, and Utilitarianism
• Individualism, Freedom, and Society
• Liberty and Habeas Corpus
• Should Britain Have a Bill of Rights?
• Locke, Women, and Freedom
• Locke, Women, Freedom, and Individualism
• Locke, Property, and Individualism
• Children, Freedom, and Individualism
• Liberty and Mental Illness
• Sismondi and Liberty
• Mill: On Liberty
• Mill, Freedom, and Happiness
• Freedom of Speech and Moral Development
• Freedom In Kant, Hegel, and Marx
• Marx, Freedom, and Property
• Neoconservatives, Liberty, and Equality
• Freedom: the Politics of Justice and Existence
• Liberty and the American Revolution
• American Libertarians
• III: Economics and Public Policy
• How Economics Influences Political Theory
• Why Democracies Choose Deficits
• Inflation and the Welfare State
• Monetarism and the Depression
• Asian Monetary History: Gold & Silver
• Specie Money Vs. Antibullionists
• Inflation Effects On Capital
• Consumption of Public Health Services
• Factory Regulation and Vested Interests
• Poverty Programs and Government
• The Costs of Regulating Market Information
• Rent Regulation
• Engels On Economics
• IV: Social Analysis
• The Depoliticization of Society
• Is Philosophy Politically Subversive?
• Plato's Republic As a Political Dystopia
• Cicero and Modern Political Philosophy
• The Roman Jurist Gaius and Social Thought
• The Myth of Social Hierarchy
• Contract and Political Thought
• Private Vs. Public: the Domain of Freedom
• Montaigne and the Value of Tolerance
• Commerce, Utility, Character, and Republicanism
• Quintin Skinner and Western Political Thought
• Public Choice
• Editorial Board
• Contents of Vol. 33 No. 2
• Contents of Vol. 33 No. 3

Ricardo and the “Dual Development”

Samuel Hollander

• University of Toronto

“The Reception of Ricardian Economics.” Oxford Economic Papers 29 (July 1977): 221–257.

Many historians of economic thought have argued that the economics of Ricardo was moribund by the 1830s. As a result, economics after this time developed in a dual fashion, split between the Ricardians and their opponents. Both of these contentions exaggerate the extent to which the dissenters rejected Ricardo.

The basic proposition of Ricardo's economics is the inverse relationship between profits and wages (more profits would mean less wages, and vice versa). The wage-rate is taken to be determined from outside the price-system and is measured in terms of a commodity standard of allegedly constant value, such as gold. Increases in wages, according to this view, cannot be inflationary but react only on the rate of profits. Opponents of this approach argue that to consider the wage-rate as determined outside the system is arbitrarily to reduce the number of variables for analysis.

Ricardo's contemporaries, however, did not advance criticisms of this sort against the doctrine. On the contrary, even alleged dissenters against Ricardo's system such as Mountstuart Longfield, Thomas Malthus, and Samuel Bailey all accepted the basic Ricardian doctrine of an inverse wage-profit ratio.

Furthermore, the Ricardian school was much stronger than often pictured. Recent suggestions that J.R. McCulloch was not a full-fledged Ricardian but was more in the tradition of Adam Smith must be rejected. Similarly, Thomas DeQuincey remained a loyal expositor of his mentor, Ricardo.

The members of the supposed dissenting school of anti-Ricardians did not form a united front but often criticized one another much more than they questioned Ricardo. For example, Malthus strongly dissented from many of the propositions of Samuel Bailey. Furthermore, many of their doctrines were consistent with Ricardianism. This is especially the case as regards the long-run determination of wages by supply and demand.

Those who postulate a dual development of nineteenth-century British economics inaccurately place John Stuart Mill in the non-Ricardian camp. Mill regarded himself as someone continuing to develop the insights of Ricardo; to a large extent this could be said of almost all nineteenth-century British economists prior to Mill.