The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England

Much damage has been done to the study of the history of economic thought in this country by the general adoption of what may be called a teleological approach to the work of the Classical economists. Modern historians too often tend to be. interested not so much in investigating the particular problems which their predecessors believed to be important and the reasons which motivated them in their choice of weapons to attack these problems, as in tracing the genealogies of modern theories and supplying them with respectable pedigrees. We seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to escape for a moment from contemporary prepossessions and problems and to imagine an age in which a number of the basic questions at issue, and even the economic problem. itself, were different from those of our own time. We sometimes tend to suggest, for example, that the absence from the Classical system of some particular doctrine which we to-day regard as vitally important must necessarily have hindered that system from performing the tasks which it set out to perform; and even more often we imply that if such a doctrine does appear in the Classical system it must necessarily have assumned the same degree of importance in that context as it does in its present one. We visualise economic theory, in other words, as evolving almost purposively towards its present state. This article, which criticises certain modern accounts of the development of Ricardian doctrines in England, is intended priinarily as a criticism of the teleological approach which lies behind these accounts. Most historians of economic thought have laid considerable stress on the tlheoretical innovations of the 1870s Os marking the real dividing line between Classical political economy and modern economics, and have tended to treat the pioneer work of the amazing decade following Ricardo's death as little more than a flash in the pan. Even Professor Seligman

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