ABSTRACT
As is well known, Ricardo’s career as an economist was relatively short-lived, covering about the last 15 years (1809–1823) of his life. One of the remarkable features of his writings was that each of them was closely related to an important political and economic problem of the time, and in many cases their dates of publication were chosen to coincide with the debating and voting on bills in Parliament. Ricardo’s activities as an economic polemicist had the explicit aim of intervening in debates on the issues most ardently discussed at that time, namely the currency and the Corn Laws – from the standpoint of bullionism for the former, and opposition to the laws for the latter – and of influencing the parliamentary debates on those bills.
