History of Economic Thought by Isaac Ilyich Rubin & Catherine Colliot-Thelene

Author:Isaac Ilyich Rubin & Catherine Colliot-Thelene [Rubin, Isaac Ilyich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2015-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

2

On the High Price of Bullion, A Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes (1810), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M.H. Dobb, Volume III (Cambridge University Press, 1951).

3

Ricardo, letter to Trower of 29 October 1815, in Works (Sraffa edition), Vol. VI (CUP, 1952), p. 315.

4

Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II (Progress Publishers English edition), p. 118 (Marx’s italics).

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Philosophical and Methodological Bases of Ricardo’s Theory

In the great historical contest between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie Ricardo stood decisively on the side of the latter. It would be a great mistake, however, to accept Held’s statement that ‘Ricardo’s doctrine was dictated simply out of the money capitalist’s hatred for the landlord class.’[1] In Ricardo’s time the industrial bourgeoisie still played a progressive historical role, and its ideologues still felt themselves leaders of the entire ‘people’ in a struggle against the aristocracy and monarchy.[2]

Ricardo was an ardent champion of the bourgeois capitalist order because he saw it as the best means for guaranteeing, 1) the greatest individual happiness, and 2) the maximum growth of the productive forces.

Bourgeois economic science had already raised the demand for free competition and individual economic initiative in the 18th century. Both the Physiocrats and Smith consecrated this demand by making reference to the eternal, natural right of the individual. By the beginning of the 19th century the role of natural right as the bourgeoisie’s main spiritual weapon in its struggle for a new order had played itself out. The foundations of the capitalist order had already been laid, and the greater its successes the more were the ideologists of the bourgeoisie themselves prepared to abandon their naive faith in the impending realization of a ‘natural order’ of universal equality and brotherhood. The bitter disappointments of the French revolution, the desperate state of the labouring masses during the time of the industrial revolution, and the first portents of the budding struggle between the bourgeoisie and working class left little room for the illusions of yesteryear. From the beginning of the 19th century demands for equality and brotherhood alluding to the natural right of the individual were mostly coming from the mouths of the first defenders of the proletariat, the early utopian socialists. Henceforth, the antethesis previously made between bourgeois natural right and feudal tradition became impossible and inadequate. The ideologists of the bourgeoisie were faced with a new and difficult problem: to justify the bourgeois order at one and the same time against both feudal tradition and the demands for natural equality being raised by the socialists. Called upon to solve this problem was the new philosophical system of ‘utilitarianism’ developed by Bentham, which gained great currency from the 1820’s onwards. If the theory of natural right had served as philosophical basis for the doctrines of the Physiocrats and Smith, Ricardo and his closest disciples were fervent adherents of utilitarianism.

Although utilitarianism denied the doctrine of natural right, on one point it continued in the same direction: it gave definitive formulation to the Weltanschauung of individualism.

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