The Life and Times of David Ricardo

My previous contribution to this series was devoted to Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986), a man with a very high opinion of David Ricardo as an economic theorist, even though he was never himself in any sense a Ricardian. Kaldor once described Ricardo’s Principles as being ‘generally regarded as the basis of modern economics’ (Kaldor 1978, p. 183). As he wrote in 1982, with reference to Keynes’s General Theory: ‘It will rank as one of the top 5 classics in the field — of comparable importance to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles, Marx’s Das Kapital and Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics’ (Kaldor 1982, p. 259). Half a century earlier, Claud Guillebaud (1927, p. 16) went even further, describing Ricardo as ‘perhaps the greatest intellect which has turned to economic science’. If this is a contentious assessment, it is probably more generally accepted that ‘no figure in the history of economics has been more controversial than Ricardo’ (Whitaker 1989, p. 492).1