ABSTRACT
Attention has been drawn to the fact that adherence to Unitarianism in the early decades of the nineteenth century was not a choice of convenience that one could make so as to have a patent of respectability while paying the cheapest entrance fee. Instead, it was adherence to the most radically ‘progressive’ community of the time, when religious faith was the driving force behind the commitment to such campaigns as women’s emancipation, unlimited freedom of opinion, and the abolition of slavery. Ricardo moved on from the study of the newborn science, geology, to the other cutting-edge science of the time, political economy – a choice that was encouraged not only by his experience in finance but also by the civic commitment that found inspiration in his contacts with Quakers and Unitarians. The themes are multi-causality, the realism of hypotheses and the heuristic function of hypothetical cases, the possibility of causal explanation, and general laws.
