ABSTRACT
A central part of current debate in the history of economic thought concerns the ‘decline in Ricardo’s authority in matters relating to the fundamental theorem on distribution and its derivation in terms of the invariable yardstick even in the work of the “Ricardians” – including McCulloch and De Quincey’ (Hollander 1979: 661). Underlying this debate1 is the notion of a dual development in economic thought in the nineteenth century, which contradicts the notion of a single continuous development in the theory of value, and is also of relevance to views on the longevity of Ricardo’s basic theoretical propositions. The supporters of the dual development approach (especially Dobb 1973) see one development departing from Smith’s supply-demand analysis of market prices leading up to the neoclassical general equilibrium tradition; the other development is the prices of production approach from Ricardo and Marx to the more developed forms of Dmitriev, von Bortkiewicz and especially Sraffa. Historians supporting this dual approach have eliminated J. S. Mill and J. R. McCulloch from the Ricardo school, and as Hollander (1977a: 39) put it, ‘a similar revisionist interpretation has recently been put forward regarding Thomas De Quincey’.2
