Ricardo, David

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English economist. With the possible exception of German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, no great economist of the past has received so many divergent and even contradictory interpretations as David Ricardo. No sooner had his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) appeared, but he attracted a number of ardent disciples who hailed him as the founder of a new rigorous science of political economy. However, these were soon followed by an even larger number of detractors, who struggled to escape from the grip of Ricardo's overwhelming influence on the economic thinking of his times.

The leading economic textbook of the mid-19th century, English philosopher John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848), paid tribute once again to Ricardo's genius and secured his reputation with yet another generation of students. With the onset of the ‘marginal revolution’ in the 1870s, Ricardo's star finally began to wane and many now agreed with English economist William Jevons that he had ‘shunted the car of economic science onto a wrong line’. The fact that German philosopher and economist Karl Marx hailed Ricardo as his intellectual mentor served if anything to accelerate the anti-Ricardian trend, and even English economist Alfred Marshall's charitable effort in his Principles of Economics (1890) to make the best case for Ricardo failed to save his declining reputation.

White represents the snow on Monte Titano and the clouds above. Blue stands for the sky. Effective date: 6 April 1862. >>