ABSTRACT
Professor O'Brien has paid me the high compliment of subjecting my Economics of David Ricardo (1979) to a very close examination. I am grateful to him despite the fact that he takes strong exception to what he calls my ‘frontal assault upon the accumulated body of Ricardo scholarship’ (1981, 385). I have given his objections the serious consideration which they merit, and find, in my turn, his defence of the standard textbook interpretation of Ricardo's economics to be unconvincing. I do not see that he adds to the documentation, primary and secondary, that was available and taken into account when I composed my volume or to the appropriate interpretation of that documentation. On the contrary, what he has to say convinces me that the consensus view does far less justice to Ricardo than the historical record dictates.
