Ricardo the ‘Logician’ versus Tooke the ‘Empiricist’: On Their Different Substantive Contributions to Classical Economics

David Ricardo and Thomas Tooke were contemporaries in the ‘golden era’ of English classical economics. Whereas Ricardo can be characterised as the supreme deductive thinker among the classical economists of the time, Tooke can be characterised as the supreme inductive and empirical thinker. Ricardo’s substantive contributions were to the core theory of value and distribution. Tooke’s substantive contributions were to the empirical analysis of prices and to monetary theory and policy. The relationship between these two classical economists with their very different approaches to economics is explored and their substantive contributions to the development of classical economics are compared. Tooke’s banking school monetary theory is shown to represent an outright rejection of Ricardo’s well-established monetary theory. It is argued that Tooke’s monetary theory provides a more valuable and lasting contribution than Ricardo’s quantity theory of money to the development of classical economics after Sraffa. In a brief conclusion, the different substantive contributions of these two economists to modern classical economics are reconciled.