Ryan Walter
Biographic Data
| ID | 3832407 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryan Walter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ryan |
| FAMILY NAME | Walter |
| SIGNATURE | WALTER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1907-001X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Corn Laws of 1815: Policy counsel, casuistry, and theory
The literature that attacked and defended Britain’s Corn Laws is typically studied in relation to the history of economic theory, focusing on the supposed discovery of comparative advantage or the law of diminishing returns. This paper adopts a different approach to the debates of 1813–1815, examining the idiom in which Parliament was accustomed to receiving advice on commercial legislation, identified here as policy counsel. Parliament, understo…
William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (1819): A New Contextual Appreciation
Linguagem, contexto e história do pensamento econômico: Antes da economia ter sua própria língua
Tradução das primeiras seções da introdução de Before Method and Models: The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo, de Ryan Walter
Before Method and Models: The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo
Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion C…
Conservative Politics and Laissez-Faire Economics: The Burke-Smith Problem Revisited
Edmund Burke is commonly understood as having championed free markets, thereby revealing debts to his contemporary Adam Smith. Numerous scholars have identified a tension between this aspect of Burke’s thinking and his politics of tradition and conservation. This article argues that this reading of Burke is untenable because it relates Burke and Smith in doctrinal terms, at the cost of ignoring the divergent ways in which they constructed their a…
Malthus’s sacred history: Outflanking civil history in the late Enlightenment
This essay locates Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in the historiography of his time. It does so by clarifying the manner in which Malthus used his account of population-food dynamics to retell the grand narrative of Roman decline leading to barbarism, feudalism, and then commerce. The result of Malthus’s intervention was to demote in importance both the actions of the usual historical actors – legislators, pri…
Office, Political Theory, and the Political Theorist
‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thin…
Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart's Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice
To subject politics to "theory," "metaphysics," or "speculation" was disreputable in 1790s Britain, owing largely to the success of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which linked these practices with enthusiasm. This fact is well established, but less studied are the means by which those committed to these forms of inquiry defended their intellectual conduct. Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mi…
The Bullion Controversy and the history of political thought: Experience, innovation and theory
In 1797 the British government relieved the Bank of England of the obligation to pay specie for its notes upon demand; then, after bitter debate and sustained inflation, it restored this burden in 1821. The episode is studied as the “Bullion Controversy”, and it is commonly assigned high significance in the development of monetary theory. Yet the Bank stood as an old target for so-called “country” thought, which suspected commerce of corroding vi…
Rhetoric or Deliberation? The Case for Rhetorical Political Analysis
This article joins together recent work in rhetorical political analysis with methodological advances made in intellectual history to prospect a historical and linguistic approach to public reason and deliberation. It is offered as an alternative to currently dominant approaches that emphasise philosophical and normative understanding, especially those associated with the ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory. This alternative approach is deve…
Adam Smith’s free trade casuistry
Smith held a low opinion of casuistry as a moral system because of its false precision and potential to corrupt our sense of duty. Yet Smith endorsed the basic premise of casuistical reasoning in relation to state administration – that the application of principles would need to take into account the circumstances of a given case, especially when principles conflicted. This paper recovers the casuistical character of Smith’s exceptions to a polic…
The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo
Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result …
The Critical Theorist's Labour: Empirical or Philosophical Historiography for International Relations
Robert Cox developed a potent approach to studying world orders that is premised on the capacities of a special intellectual, the critical theorist, to discern social structures and the possibilities for their radical change in the future. While acknowledging the ethical appeal of adopting this intellectual persona, in this paper we are concerned with the style of historiography that it requires. In particular, we argue that the imperative to dis…
From theory to history: Keith Tribe's Land, labour and economic discourse and The economy of the word
It is impossible to think of another scholar writing in English today who can equal Keith Tribe for his mastery of such a wide range of sources in the history of economic thought.1 In The economy o
The Rhetorical Standards of Public Reason in Australia
Our article examines recent Australian political speech to discover rhetorical standards for deliberation. Unlike philosophical standards for public reason — such as those developed by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls — rhetorical standards are not anchored in reason, but in the institutional and linguistic constraints of partisan political speech. Accordingly, rhetorical standards are unwritten, malleable, and permissive. Two standards are apparen…
Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests
Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true i…
A Critical History of the Economy: On the Birth of the National and International Economies
Drawing on recent debates in critical International Political Economy, this book mobilizes the idea that the economy does not exist separately from society and politics to develop a detailed intellectual history of how the economy came to be seen as an independent domain. In contrast to typical approaches to writing the history of economic thought, which assume the reality of the economy, the author describes the forms of intellectual argument th…
Budget talk: Rhetorical constraints and contests
This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010-13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reve
States and markets
Use of the ‘states and markets’ pair to conceptualise the international is pervasive. This article narrates the intellectual genesis of this dyad in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political œconomy. Adam Smith's arguments in Wealth of Nations are central, for there the analysis of strength is uncoupled from the analysis of wealth, de-politicising the international and making the economic denunciation of war possible. In the process th…
Politics and economics: Beyond the contamination thesis
Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique
Hobbes is commonly treated as a foundational figure for liberalism. This familiar view relies on emphasizing his account of the relationship between rights bearing individuals and state power. By contrast, this essay centers the practical question of how to govern, and develops this perspective to both question Hobbes's supposed liberalism and to demonstrate the utility of construing liberalism as more than a set of philosophical arguments regard…
Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: The primacy of politics
Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this non-encounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault's and Skinner's accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out …
The economy and Pocock's political economy
In his histories of political discourse, Pocock has construed political economy as a prime site for hostile responses to the dilapidating effects of commerce on the virtue of citizens. In this paper, I dispute two aspects of Pocock's treatment of this terrain. The first is the criteria he uses to identify the constitution of political economy, which are vague and make no reference to the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a sphere distinct from the st…
Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world…
Governmentality accounts of the economy: A Liberal Bias
The governmentality literature offers a host of insights into liberal modes of government. A key theme in this literature is that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous domain requiring its own form of governmental reason. Yet the emergence of the economy has never been specified, in terms of both what would constitute an economy and how it was constituted. Instead, the appearance of an economy has been conflated with the general rise of li…
Rhetoric or Deliberation? The Case for Rhetorical Political Analysis
This article joins together recent work in rhetorical political analysis with methodological advances made in intellectual history to prospect a historical and linguistic approach to public reason and deliberation. It is offered as an alternative to currently dominant approaches that emphasise philosophical and normative understanding, especially those associated with the ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory. This alternative approach is deve…
Governmentality accounts of the economy: A Liberal Bias
The governmentality literature offers a host of insights into liberal modes of government. A key theme in this literature is that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous domain requiring its own form of governmental reason. Yet the emergence of the economy has never been specified, in terms of both what would constitute an economy and how it was constituted. Instead, the appearance of an economy has been conflated with the general rise of li…
The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo
Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result …
Budget talk: Rhetorical constraints and contests
This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010-13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reve
Adam Smith’s free trade casuistry
Smith held a low opinion of casuistry as a moral system because of its false precision and potential to corrupt our sense of duty. Yet Smith endorsed the basic premise of casuistical reasoning in relation to state administration – that the application of principles would need to take into account the circumstances of a given case, especially when principles conflicted. This paper recovers the casuistical character of Smith’s exceptions to a polic…
The Critical Theorist's Labour: Empirical or Philosophical Historiography for International Relations
Robert Cox developed a potent approach to studying world orders that is premised on the capacities of a special intellectual, the critical theorist, to discern social structures and the possibilities for their radical change in the future. While acknowledging the ethical appeal of adopting this intellectual persona, in this paper we are concerned with the style of historiography that it requires. In particular, we argue that the imperative to dis…
Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests
Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true i…
Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: The primacy of politics
Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this non-encounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault's and Skinner's accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out …
Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world…
Office, Political Theory, and the Political Theorist
‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thin…
The economy and Pocock's political economy
In his histories of political discourse, Pocock has construed political economy as a prime site for hostile responses to the dilapidating effects of commerce on the virtue of citizens. In this paper, I dispute two aspects of Pocock's treatment of this terrain. The first is the criteria he uses to identify the constitution of political economy, which are vague and make no reference to the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a sphere distinct from the st…
Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the state: The primacy of politics
Foucault and Skinner have each offered influential accounts of the emergence of the state as a defining element of modern political thought. Yet the two accounts have never been brought into dialogue; this non-encounter is made more interesting by the fact that Foucault's and Skinner's accounts are at odds with one another. There is therefore much to be gained by examining this divergence. In this article I attempt this task by first setting out …
The economy and Pocock's political economy
In his histories of political discourse, Pocock has construed political economy as a prime site for hostile responses to the dilapidating effects of commerce on the virtue of citizens. In this paper, I dispute two aspects of Pocock's treatment of this terrain. The first is the criteria he uses to identify the constitution of political economy, which are vague and make no reference to the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a sphere distinct from the st…
Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world…
Governmentality accounts of the economy: A Liberal Bias
The governmentality literature offers a host of insights into liberal modes of government. A key theme in this literature is that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous domain requiring its own form of governmental reason. Yet the emergence of the economy has never been specified, in terms of both what would constitute an economy and how it was constituted. Instead, the appearance of an economy has been conflated with the general rise of li…
States and markets
Use of the ‘states and markets’ pair to conceptualise the international is pervasive. This article narrates the intellectual genesis of this dyad in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political œconomy. Adam Smith's arguments in Wealth of Nations are central, for there the analysis of strength is uncoupled from the analysis of wealth, de-politicising the international and making the economic denunciation of war possible. In the process th…
Politics and economics: Beyond the contamination thesis
Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique
Hobbes is commonly treated as a foundational figure for liberalism. This familiar view relies on emphasizing his account of the relationship between rights bearing individuals and state power. By contrast, this essay centers the practical question of how to govern, and develops this perspective to both question Hobbes's supposed liberalism and to demonstrate the utility of construing liberalism as more than a set of philosophical arguments regard…
A Critical History of the Economy: On the Birth of the National and International Economies
Drawing on recent debates in critical International Political Economy, this book mobilizes the idea that the economy does not exist separately from society and politics to develop a detailed intellectual history of how the economy came to be seen as an independent domain. In contrast to typical approaches to writing the history of economic thought, which assume the reality of the economy, the author describes the forms of intellectual argument th…
Budget talk: Rhetorical constraints and contests
This article examines the budget surplus debate that occurred during the Gillard minority government (2010-13) to broaden the range of linguistic phenomena that are typically scrutinised in relation to Australian political rhetoric. The budget debate reve
The Rhetorical Standards of Public Reason in Australia
Our article examines recent Australian political speech to discover rhetorical standards for deliberation. Unlike philosophical standards for public reason — such as those developed by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls — rhetorical standards are not anchored in reason, but in the institutional and linguistic constraints of partisan political speech. Accordingly, rhetorical standards are unwritten, malleable, and permissive. Two standards are apparen…
Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests
Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true i…
Adam Smith’s free trade casuistry
Smith held a low opinion of casuistry as a moral system because of its false precision and potential to corrupt our sense of duty. Yet Smith endorsed the basic premise of casuistical reasoning in relation to state administration – that the application of principles would need to take into account the circumstances of a given case, especially when principles conflicted. This paper recovers the casuistical character of Smith’s exceptions to a polic…
The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo
Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result …
The Critical Theorist's Labour: Empirical or Philosophical Historiography for International Relations
Robert Cox developed a potent approach to studying world orders that is premised on the capacities of a special intellectual, the critical theorist, to discern social structures and the possibilities for their radical change in the future. While acknowledging the ethical appeal of adopting this intellectual persona, in this paper we are concerned with the style of historiography that it requires. In particular, we argue that the imperative to dis…
From theory to history: Keith Tribe's Land, labour and economic discourse and The economy of the word
It is impossible to think of another scholar writing in English today who can equal Keith Tribe for his mastery of such a wide range of sources in the history of economic thought.1 In The economy o
Rhetoric or Deliberation? The Case for Rhetorical Political Analysis
This article joins together recent work in rhetorical political analysis with methodological advances made in intellectual history to prospect a historical and linguistic approach to public reason and deliberation. It is offered as an alternative to currently dominant approaches that emphasise philosophical and normative understanding, especially those associated with the ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory. This alternative approach is deve…
The Bullion Controversy and the history of political thought: Experience, innovation and theory
In 1797 the British government relieved the Bank of England of the obligation to pay specie for its notes upon demand; then, after bitter debate and sustained inflation, it restored this burden in 1821. The episode is studied as the “Bullion Controversy”, and it is commonly assigned high significance in the development of monetary theory. Yet the Bank stood as an old target for so-called “country” thought, which suspected commerce of corroding vi…
Office, Political Theory, and the Political Theorist
‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thin…
Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart's Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice
To subject politics to "theory," "metaphysics," or "speculation" was disreputable in 1790s Britain, owing largely to the success of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which linked these practices with enthusiasm. This fact is well established, but less studied are the means by which those committed to these forms of inquiry defended their intellectual conduct. Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mi…
Conservative Politics and Laissez-Faire Economics: The Burke-Smith Problem Revisited
Edmund Burke is commonly understood as having championed free markets, thereby revealing debts to his contemporary Adam Smith. Numerous scholars have identified a tension between this aspect of Burke’s thinking and his politics of tradition and conservation. This article argues that this reading of Burke is untenable because it relates Burke and Smith in doctrinal terms, at the cost of ignoring the divergent ways in which they constructed their a…
Malthus’s sacred history: Outflanking civil history in the late Enlightenment
This essay locates Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in the historiography of his time. It does so by clarifying the manner in which Malthus used his account of population-food dynamics to retell the grand narrative of Roman decline leading to barbarism, feudalism, and then commerce. The result of Malthus’s intervention was to demote in importance both the actions of the usual historical actors – legislators, pri…
Before Method and Models: The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo
Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion C…
Linguagem, contexto e história do pensamento econômico: Antes da economia ter sua própria língua
Tradução das primeiras seções da introdução de Before Method and Models: The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo, de Ryan Walter
The Corn Laws of 1815: Policy counsel, casuistry, and theory
The literature that attacked and defended Britain’s Corn Laws is typically studied in relation to the history of economic theory, focusing on the supposed discovery of comparative advantage or the law of diminishing returns. This paper adopts a different approach to the debates of 1813–1815, examining the idiom in which Parliament was accustomed to receiving advice on commercial legislation, identified here as policy counsel. Parliament, understo…
William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (1819): A New Contextual Appreciation
Law (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Economics (14 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works)