ABSTRACT
Few problems in the history of economic thought are as contentious as those surrounding the interpretation of Ricardo. Controversy over Ricardo is of relatively recent vintage, however. Prior to the publication of Samuel Hollander’s Economica paper ‘Ricardo’s analysis of the profit rate’ (1973b), discussions of Ricardo’s work were, by and large, dry, dispassionate affairs. If they did not cast much light, nor did they generate noticeable heat. Jevons of course had seen Ricardo as an ‘able but wrongheaded man [who] shunted the car of economic science on to a wrong line’ (1879: lvii); and Marshall (1920: appendix I), partly in reaction to Jevons, had defended Ricardo’s economics as an embryonic version of the marginalist theory of supply and demand. Marshall’s disagreement with Jevons concerning Ricardo was a minor skirmish that received, and probably warranted, little notice at the time. But viewed in retrospect it anticipates the very issues that have driven Ricardo scholarship since the publication of Sraffa’s edition of the Works and Correspondence (Ricardo 1951-73).
