David Ricardo (1772–1823)

Ricardo’s intellectual appeal, both amongst his contemporaries and more recently, rested on his remarkable gift for heroic abstractions: he seized hold of a wide range of significant problems with a simple analytical model and yielded, after a few elementary manipulations, dramatic conclusions of a distinctly practical nature. In short, precisely the art Keynes was to use so successfully. Although his reputation ebbed towards the end of the nineteenth century, he was still being acclaimed by economists as diverse as Marx and Marshall. Ironically, since Sraffa’s work revived Ricardo’s reputation, this most bourgeois of economists has been brought back into contemporary debate by economists seeking Marx’s intellectual mentors. This selection of recent articles reflects the renewal of interest in Ricardo’s work.