WHATEVER HAPPENED TO RICARDO'S THEORY OF VALUE? MILL, MCCULLOCH, AND THE CASE OF ‘OAK-TREES’ AND ‘WINE’

Giancarlo De Vivo

Contributions to Political Economy, 2017, vol. 36, issue 1, 25-42

Abstract: This paper deals with the fate of Ricardo's theory of value after Ricardo's death in 1823. We will show how Mill and McCulloch, the self-appointed ‘two and only genuine disciples’ of Ricardo, starting from being in a sense more Ricardian than Ricardo, really in the end gave up Ricardo's theory. The important and difficult question was of course that of the ‘modifications’ to the ‘general rule’ that the relative values of commodities are determined by the amounts of labour necessary to produce them. James Mill and McCulloch tried to answer the objections against Ricardo's theory ‘by a verbal fiction, by changing the correct name of things’, and they thus ‘did more to undermine the foundation of the Ricardian theory than all the attacks of the opponents’ (Marx). It is here shown that these ‘verbal fictions’ were accompanied by gradual, but substantial, changes in the theory itself, which de facto amounted to abandoning it. The theoretical situation to which this gave rise was aptly described by A.C. Whitaker, the historian of the labour theory of value, as one of complete chaos.

JEL-codes: A10 B10 B12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cpe/bzx006 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:copoec:v:36:y:2017:i:1:p:25-42.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Contributions to Political Economy is currently edited by Jacqui Lagrue

More articles in Contributions to Political Economy from Cambridge Political Economy Society Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().