ABSTRACT
The David Ricardian ‘problematic’ was historically set by the given circumstances, by the parameters of the completion of the English bourgeois revolution, initiated heroically in the mid-seventeenth century. The Ricardian period, and this accounts for much of its effulgence, was overlaid principally by the first of the struggles – although significandy cognizant of the stirrings of the second. The Ricardian manifest did that effectively, but let no-one doubt the real meaning of that specious slogan: in the context of capitalism, as with the recent Reagan-Thatcher wave of reaction, laissez-faire has always implied state support for capital at the expense of other social orders. Ricardian theory was not the inspired conspiracy of some loosely organised, ad hoc, social platform; it expressed concretely the struggle of industrial capitalism against the last vestiges of the political economy of the landlords – therein its historically limited relevance.
