ABSTRACT
Ricardo was the great logician among the classical economists. Nobody tried harder than he to create a consistent theory of economic value. And yet his entire system of thought is beset with inner conflicts and dichotomies. Ricardo tried to arrive at an absolute concept of economic value and to prove that absolute and, to a large extent, relative value is determined by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of a commodity. Ricardo’s theory of value was thus influenced by trends in science and by the tendency to unify the world outlook in interpreting the creation of economic value in analogy to mechanical and technological processes. Ricardo wanted to prove that labour bestowed in production determines exchange values, because the idea that economic rewards should be commensurate with work effort formed a part of the internalized value system of his period.
