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A review essay on Nancy Churchman’s, David Ricardo on Public Debt. London: Palgrave, 2001. This is a fair minded, temperate and well-written essay on Ricardo’s treatment of the “National Debt” as it is known in the British literature. It hangs together, despite prior publication of the majority of the chapters, very well – only Chap. 5 (dealing with Ricardo’s motives, and the imputation of personal financial interest) is unmistakably a journal article.

Timothy Davis has produced a well researched, well written and scholarly piece of work that merits serious attention by historians of economic thought. His principal aim is to reassess Ricardo's credentials as an “applied economist,” and to that end he devotes a couple of very useful chapters to a blow-by-blow account of the UK's turbulent economic history between 1815 and 1825, four chapters to Ricardo and, also usefully, a series of appendices relating to the vital economic statistics of the period. The Ricardo that emerges from this study is (almost) a paragon of “applied virtue.” Ricardo was, we are told (repeatedly), fully conversant with the available empirical evidence, his writings were directed to concrete economic problems (except for the Principles, apparently) and, most importantly of all, his empirical analysis was “exemplary” and fully “validated” by events. The only real blemish was his law-of-markets based assumption of full employment at a time of general economic “distress,” leading him to reject all proposals for “relief works,” which Davis finds “particularly unsatisfactory” and “remarkable” (he might well have said “inexplicable”) in view of Ricardo's (supposedly) keen appreciation of economic reality. All in all, however, Ricardo's “applied” credentials are rather impressive.

This paper is a translation of the third and most important chapter of Keizaigaku shi (History of Political Economy) by the Japanese Marxist economist Samezō Kuruma (1893–1982), first published in 1948. Kuruma discusses in detail the achievements and limitations of the Classical school of political economy. He examines the fundamental ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo regarding the determination of commodity value and the source of surplus-value, and then looks at how these ideas are connected to production price and profit. Kuruma notes that Smith and Ricardo managed to arrive at the essential labor theory of value, but that neither could correctly apply this theory to adequately explain phenomena in the realm of competition – either abandoning the labor theory of value altogether to embrace a composition theory of value (Smith) or directly applying the theory to explain phenomena without grasping the intermediary processes of development (Ricardo). Kuruma's critique of Smith and Ricardo highlights the achievement of Marx in overcoming the limitations that ultimately led to the breakdown of the Classical school of political economy.

After the end of the Napoleonic War, few issues of public policy dominated discussions in England as fervently as the issue of currency and the national debt. A time of civil unrest and social radicalisation, the circulation of ideas and pamphlets was prolific. The difficulties of post-war reconstruction sparked a long debate on issues of monetary reform and repayment of the national debt. The growth of national debt increased the size of the financial market and had important consequences for a changing class dynamic in domestic political affairs. The distributional aspects of the conflict were present, as was the satirical mockery of mishandling of public affairs. In much of the subsequent scholarship the organisation of taxation and expenditure, and the financial system and the issue of currency have been analysed as separate. This chapter brings them together. In particular, it focuses on Ricardo’s monetary thought and his views on public finance and contextualises them in light of his contemporaries.

Elie Halévy essentially expressed the view recorded by James Mill in his anonymously written ‘On the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value’⁷ that the first chapter of the Critical Dissertation relating to the nature of value ‘contains not an assertion, who which, as far as ideas politico-economical are concerned, Mr. Ricardo would not have assented; it contains, not indeed, as far as such ideas are concerned, an assertion which is not implied in the propositions which Mr. Ricardo has put forth. It is a criticism on some of Mr. Ricardo's forms of expression…’ ([J. Mill], 1826a, p. 157). The justification for the Ricardian reaction is clear enough, as I shall now show.⁸

One of the several claims that Seligman makes for Rooke is that he should be accorded priority in the discovery of the correct, that is Ricardian, doctrine of rent:there seems little doubt that the doctrine of rent was developed practically simultaneously by Malthus, West, Torrens and Rooke in 1814, but so far as the priority of actual publication is concerned, the above list should be reversed. And in the interests of historical accuracy, Rooke and Torrens must hereafter be accorded the position which they deserve. (Seligman, 1903, p. 512)¹

On rent, Seligman's claim is based on the fact that in the first edition of the Essay on the External Corn Trade (1815) Torrens conceives rent as a ‘net surplus’, which is undoubtedly true, but not in itself very significant: Adam Smith had already written of rent as surplus produce,¹⁸ and following Smith the same conception is to be found in a number of authors, for instance in Spence's 1807 tract Britain Independent of Commerce, which Torrens certainly knew, having written The Economists Refuted against it in 1808. Spence in fact speaks of rent as ‘the surplus produce paid to [the class of land proprietors] under the denomination of rent’ (Spence, 1807, p. 17).¹⁹

This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.