The Life and Times of David Ricardo

John E. King

Chapter 1 in David Ricardo, 2013, pp 1-28 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract 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

Keywords: Eighteenth Century; Industrial Revolution; Total Wealth; Tenant Farmer; Loan Contractor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:gtechp:978-1-137-31595-3_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137315953

DOI: 10.1057/9781137315953_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Great Thinkers in Economics from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().