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David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography

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David Ricardo. An
Intellectual Biography

David Ricardo has been acclaimed – or vilified – for merits he would never have dreamt of, or
sins for which he was entirely innocent. Entrenched mythology labels him as a utilitarian
economist, an enemy of the working class, an impractical theorist, a scientist with ‘no
philosophy at all’ and the author of a formalist methodological revolution. Exploring a middle
ground between theory and biography, this book explores the formative intellectual
encounters of a man who came to economic studies via other experiences, thus bridging the
gap between the historical Ricardo and the economist’s Ricardo.

The chapters undertake a thorough analysis of Ricardo’s writings in their context, asking who
was speaking, what audience was being addressed, with what communicative intentions,
using what kind of lexicon and communicative conventions, and starting with what shared
knowledge. The work opens in presenting the different religious communities with which
Ricardo was in touch. It goes on to describe his education in the leading science of the time –
geology – before he turned to the study of political economy. Another chapter discusses five
‘philosophers’ – students of logic, ethics and politics – with whom he was in touch. From
correspondence, manuscripts and publications, the closing chapters reconstruct, firstly,
Ricardo’s ideas on scientific method, the limits of the ‘abstract science’ and its application,
secondly, his ideas on ethics and politics and their impact on strategies for improving the
condition of the working class. This book sheds new light on Ricardian economics, providing
an invaluable service to readers of economic methodology, philosophy of economics, the
history of economic thought, political thought and philosophy.

Sergio Cremaschi is a former Reader of Moral Philosophy at the ‘Amedeo Avogadro’

University at Vercelli, Italy.
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David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography

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David Ricardo. An
Intellectual Biography

Sergio Cremaschi

First published 2022

by Routledge
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Contents

About the author ix

Preface: Science, logic, ethics and theology in Ricardo’s

intellectual biography xi

1 Ricardo’s Sepharad 1

Twenty-one years in Ricardo’s life 1

Anglo-Judaism from 1600 to 1793 3

Echoes from the Haskalah 5

Ricardo’s education 5

Partial conclusions: the importance of being an outsider 13

2 Ricardo’s encounter with the Quakers 18

The Society of Friends 18

British Quakerism at the time of the French Revolution 20

The impossible marriage of a Jew with a Quaker 21

Ricardo’s Quaker relations 25

Ricardo’s involvement in a Quaker secession 26

Partial conclusions: the importance of being a husband 27

3 Ricardo’s encounter with the Unitarians 29

Scripture and reason 29

Ricardo’s ‘conversion’ 31

Robert Aspland, the missionary to the Jews 33

Thomas Belsham, the Biblical scholar 34

James Lindsay, the campaigner for Toleration 38

John Bowring and Thomas Smith 40

Partial conclusions: the importance of being a Dissenter 41

vi Contents

4 Ricardo’s encounter with geologists 46

Ricardo’s higher education 46
The London Institution 50
Chemistry after the phlogiston controversy 51
Geology after the catastrophism-uniformitarianism controversy 52
Richard Kirwan 53
The Geological Society of London 56
Controversies in geology: logic, definitions, and causality 57
From chemistry and geology to political economy 58
Partial conclusions: the importance of a scientific education 62
5 Ricardo’s encounter with philosophers and political economists 66
Francis Horner and the Scottish philosophy 66
Jeremy Bentham and the philosophic radicals 69
James Mill, between Scottish philosophy and Benthamism 71
Thomas Robert Malthus and the Cambridge philosophy 76
Thomas Belsham and the Hartley-Priestley philosophy 79
Jean-Baptiste Say and the idéologie 86
Partial conclusions: a high station among philosophers 88
6 Ricardo on logic and political economy 94
Ricardian rhetoric 94
Language and definitions 98
Laws and causes 103
Permanent causes and natural magnitudes 107
Strong cases 109
The redundancy of utility 112
Ricardian logic and scientific practice 117
Ricardian logic and policy advice 122
Partial conclusions: a science without an art 124
7 Ricardo on ethics and political economy 130
Moral impressions and the rational pursuit of happiness 130
Just war 140
Penal law and private morality 142
Slavery 143
Unlimited toleration 143
Good government 146
Ethics and the uses of political economy 152
The miscarriage of all social theodicies 158
Partial conclusions: neither a utilitarian nor theological optimist 166
Contents vii

Conclusions: a man from another planet 172

Appendix 175

The Christian Reformer: text of the Christians’ Petition 175

The Christian Reformer & The Monthly Repository:

presentation of the Christians’ Petition in the House of Commons

and the House of the Lords 179

The Sunday Times: Daniel Whittle Harvey’s obituary 179

The Morning Chronicle: Mill’s Letter to the Editor 183

The Monthly Repository: obituary 184

The Gentlemen’s Magazine: obituary 185

The Penny Cyclopaedia: George Porter’s entry 186

Index 189
About the author

Sergio Cremaschi (Bergamo 1949), ‘Dottore in Filosofia’ from the Catholic University, Milan
in 1971, spent two years working in Somalia as a preparatory schoolteacher, was a research
fellow at the Catholic University and Venice University and senior lecturer at the Catholic
University. He was Reader of Philosophy of Religion at Ferrara University, then of Moral
Philosophy at Turin University and the ‘Amedeo Avogadro’ University at Vercelli. He was a
visiting fellow or lecturer at the New School for Social Research, New York, the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, Aarhus University, Denmark, Nuffield College, Oxford, the University of
Málaga. He has published on ethics and the history and philosophy of economics. He retired
in 2014.
Preface

Science, logic, ethics and theology in

Ricardo’s intellectual biography

This book is a contextual reconstruction of an economist’s intellectual biography.

The purpose is to look where others did not, due to such factors as inapt
modernisation, proneness to accept received views, constraints created by
boundaries between disciplines and historiographic mythology. The intent is to
buy intellectual history, not in bulk but in retail. This implies looking at the co-
text whenever the text is silent and at the context to make sense of what the text
says or omits to say; it implies screening out what the text may not mean from
what it may mean, reading utterances going beyond their literal meaning to seek
out the speaker’s communicative intentions, original audience and knowledge
shared with that audience. Besides, it implies looking at the history of economic
thought through spectacles different from the economist’s, at the history of
political ideas without reducing it programmatically to an appendix of the
history of economic thought, at the history of ethics as the hotbed where the
economic theory was sprouting and at the history of religion without secularist
prejudice.

Sraffa’s edition is still the starting point. He made an exceptionally meticulous

job of it, despite not being a historian but rather an economist on loan to history.
Yet, just like anyone else’s, his personal history and theoretical approach carried
a pre-comprehension that led to him emphasising some aspects and
downplaying others. Thus a few chapters in the book try to cover blanks in
Sraffa’s reconstruction, including examples such as the story of the Italian liberal
rabbi who, even before Ricardo was born, attempted to give a new start to
London’s Sephardic community; women intellectuals in the Delvalle-Ricardo
family; the birth of the new magmatic science of geology; Unitarianism with its
rationalist and socially committed message; and Ricardo’s philosophical reading.

The reading of sources may be richer now than it was for our predecessors, but
the merit is not ours. We are people of average stature standing precariously on
the shoulders of giants. Dangerous though it may be for both our stability and
the giants’ backbones, coming after Schumpeter, Sraffa and Hollander gives us a
broader perspective than any giant or person of above-average height could ever
imagine. The attempt to detect real-world influences, sources, addressees and
opponents may emancipate us from mental slavery to long-dead polemicists.
xii Preface

It will certainly help to avoid mythological reconstructions such as Halévy’s Benthamite

Ricardo, Stigler’s unphilosophical Ricardo and Hutchison’s Millian Ricardo. A century
ago, under the sway of watered-down Hegelianism, intellectual historians used to
believe that their work was done once they had detected one idea formulated by an
author in another before him. It was a search for causes instead of reasons, or the
construction of Biblical genealogies, like Bentham begot Mill and Mill begot Ricardo,
Descartes begot the Physiocrats and the Physiocrats begot Ricardo or – proceeding in
the opposite direction – the neoclassical begot modern economic science and Ricardo
must have carried the genes of neoclassical theory. Intellectual history is not a quest
for cause-effect relationships and Michelangelo’s Giudizio Universale was no more an
effect of the counter-Reformation than was Ricardo’s economic theory an effect of the
Industrial Revolution.

Besides, intellectual historians may dream that an author was influenced by another
one merely because he was later raised to greater fame while being comparatively
unknown at the time under discussion. Sometimes they read an implicit quote into a
text because they forget that the same word has a different meaning in a different
context. They may read documents in translation and forget that one word’s shades of
meaning in their own language are irrelevant when it stands for a Latin, Greek or
Hebrew word. More often they may read documents in eighteenth-century English and
take it for granted that words had the same shades of meaning or showed up in the
same contexts as now. On other occasions, they may strive to stretch meanings of
sentences to fit everything an author wrote to a system they assume he had in mind
because they are prey to the myth of coherence: that whatever an author says reveals
a system of ideas hidden in his mind. They often tend to read what an author said as
being addressed to us with the intention of informing us of facts. However, when
Ricardo complained about his neglected education to Mill, he was not informing us but
expressing respect for Mill’s education at a prestigious university and regret for having
been excluded from such an opportunity himself. When he told Mary Edgeworth that
he had been sent to Amsterdam to learn Dutch, French and Spanish but had hardly
learnt anything he was not informing us, he was shielding himself from an Anglo-Irish
aristocrat’s prying curiosity vis-à-vis such an exotic bird as a Jew.

There are multiple reasons for the existence of opposing interpretations and
misinterpretations in Ricardo scholarship. One is the comparative scarcity of
documents, another is reticence by primary sources caused by a desire not to fuel
English-chauvinist prejudice vis-à-vis a ‘migrant’, and a third one is the ballast of past
attacks or hagiography. Layers of interpretations encrusted in the text may have done
the rest, and the tendency to read sources naively and overlook contexts gives the coup
de grace. Stories of ‘influences’ by Descartes, the Physiocrats, Bentham, Mill and – as if
it were not enough – Dugald Stewart are part of the story together with the specular
picture of the first Metaphysikfrei economist whose busy mind made no room for
philosophy.
Preface xiii

More than giving wrong answers, speculations about Ricardo’s true philosophy, or lack
of philosophy, answer the wrong kind of questions. The relationship between Ricardian
economics and his intellectual outlook should be interpreted neither as the opposition
of science to philosophy (Schumpeter, Hutchison and Stigler) nor as the dependence of
science on one philosophy (Halévy). This relationship developed as a process through
which distinct intellectual experiences equipped Ricardo with suggestions whereby he
selected what he deemed useful to clarify his positive work or defend it from criticism.
The owl of Minerva, as birdwatchers know, comes out at dusk. There was no Ricardian
logic in 1811 to inspire his search for ‘principles’ that – as he wrote to Malthus on 17
April 1815 – could account ‘for all the phenomena in an easy, natural manner’ without
getting lost in a ‘labyrinth of difficulties’ (Works 6, p. 214). Instead of schooling in one
philosophy, Ricardo’s equipment with logical, linguistic, epistemological, ethical and
political ideas came from intellectual do-it-yourself. In order to respond to critics’
objections he used material from several sources, a use that was not naive eclecticism
but a search for arguments to fight what he felt to be delusory or ill-defined entities.
His weapons came from an arsenal incompatible with epistemological realism,
Cartesian rationalism or common-sense realism but bearing family resemblances with
the Geological Society’s legacy, Priestley and Belsham’s epistemology and the post-
scepticism of Adam Smith.

The author conducted part of the work during a stay at Nuffield College, Oxford in 2013,
which was made possible by a Jemolo Fellowship. He is grateful to the Bodleian Library,
the British Library, Harry Manchester College Library, the Fondazione Einaudi, Turin,
and Milan Catholic University and State University libraries. He presented the first draft
of a chapter at the 1999 ESHET Meeting in Valencia, others at the Conference of the
International Society for Utilitarian Studies, Lisbon, 2003, the 2014 STOREP
Conference in Bergamo, the 2018 ESHET Conference in Madrid, the International
Conference on Economic Philosophy, Lyon, 2018, the 2018 STOREP Conference in
Piacenza, the 2019 STOREP in Genova, the Conference on James Mill and John Stuart
Mill/Classical Political Economy, Kyoto, 2019. The author is grateful to the discussants
at these conferences, Nathalie Sigot, Andrea Salanti, Ghislain Deleplace, Yuji Sato. The
author is also grateful to Maria Luisa Pesante, Salim Rashid, Antony Waterman, Arnold
Heertje, Gilbert Faccarello, Heinz Kurz, Neri Salvadori, Richard Allen, Wilfried Parys,
Emanuele Levi Mortera and Ryan Walter for sparing him mistakes. Finally, two friends
played an essential role in the birth of this book: Marcelo Dascal, who worked with the
present author on the controversy between Malthus and Ricardo, and Pier Luigi Porta,
who introduced him to Ricardo scholarship. Daphne Hughes has patiently eliminated
from this book misprints, spelling mistakes and English usage infelicities. All that is left,
of these and others blemishes, belongs to the author.
xiv Preface

Chapter 7 contains materials from the following articles: ‘Ricardo and the Utilitarians’,
The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 11 (2004), no. 3 pp. 377–
403. DOI: 10.1080/0967256042000246476; ‘Theological themes in Ricardo’s papers
and correspondence’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 24
(2017), no. 4, pp. 784–808. DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2017.1315954. Unless a
translation appears in the bibliography, quotes from languages different from English
are the author’s translation. Throughout the text and references, Works stands for
Ricardo, D 1951– 1973, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, P Sraffa with
the collaboration of MH Dobb (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Published
works, manuscript notes and speeches are listed in bibliographies. Reference to
correspondence and evidence is made by citing volume and page of the Sraffa Edition.
Thus, Works 6, p. 33 stands for The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. 6,
p. 33.

Abstracts

1. Ricardo’s Sepharad

This chapter examines the first 21 years of his life, when he was a child in a London
Sephardi household and, from the age of 13, a member of the Bevis Marks congregation.
Given the scarcity of primary sources, the chapter adds something to the accounts
available. First, it contends that we may learn something more about Ricardo’s
formative years and his religious and moral education than Sraffa and other
biographers felt able to do with the scant documents available. Second, it contends that
Ricardo’s Sephardi background is essential to account for his moral and political
commitments, particularly his ideas on toleration, and to understand the intellectual
experiences he had and the motivations he acquired.

The chapter tries to perform a ‘thick’ reading of reticent utterances by Ricardo and
other sources in the light of their co-text and context. The chapter interprets what they
meant, whom they were addressing and what they wanted not to disclose to their
audience. It conducts such thick reading by summarising first the problems with
interpretation of sources on Ricardo’s biography, secondly illustrating the history of
the London Sephardi community until Ricardo’s time, and finally reconstructing the
context of Ricardo’s education.

Keywords

Religion; Anglo-Judaism; Jewish Education and Schools; Spanish Language; Amsterdam

2. Ricardo’s encounter with the Quakers

This chapter illustrates what English Quakerism was at the end of the eighteenth
century and the moral and intellectual assets this vibrating community granted its
members and ventures into conjectures about the kind of contacts he may have had
with Quaker milieus.

It illustrates the circumstances of Ricardo’s marriage with a Quaker and the ensuing
break with his religious community that left him in a religious no man’s land. The
chapter suggests that he became for a time a fellow traveller of Quakerism, and how
this was not an exceptional event in his time and place, when a significant percentage
of the Sephardi youngest generation, including a few among Ricardo siblings, severed
ties with their community primarily through mixed marriage.

It argues that his acquaintance with Quakerism had, arguably, some role in shaping his
political commitments and his views on toleration and philanthropic enterprises. The
chapter adds evidence to the effect that his Quaker acquaintances had a role in shaping
his intellectual interests, particularly encouraging him in the study of some areas of
natural science, namely geology, mineralogy and chemistry.

Keywords

Religion; Quakerism; Toleration; Philanthropy; Mixed Marriages in Eighteenth-Century

Britain

Ricardo’s encounter with the Unitarians

This chapter collects overlooked evidence concerning Ricardo’s adhesion to

Unitarianism, showing how this was not an isolated event but part of a flux of
adhesions, after a conflict between traditionalist and liberals, by Quakers who felt that
Unitarianism was the closest approximation to the original Quaker spirit. Then the
chapter examines elucubrations on Ricardo’s Atheism, proving that no evidence
whatsoever exists in their favour. The chapter concludes that there is no proof that
Ricardo was either an agnostic or an atheist. The facts are that he was just a Sephardi
convert like others; he converted to Unitarianism, which implied a less traumatic break
with his origins than adhesion to the established Church; and he adhered to what
looked then as the only available organised form of ‘rational belief’.

Keywords

Religion; Unitarianism; Theology; Theodicy; Toleration; Philanthropy; Science

4. Ricardo’s encounter with geologists

This chapter revises available biographical evidence about Ricardo’s family and the
kind of education he received. Evidence concerning Ricardo’s early interest in the
natural sciences, considered by Sraffa to have had a more profound impact on Ricardo’s
mind than Benthamite philosophy, is collected and interpreted. It discusses the
circumstance that geology was the most innovative science of the time because of its
recent discoveries and their impact on religious issues such as the Creation of the world
and the Bible’s trustworthiness. It reconstructs the contents of a book for boys on
mineralogy by one of Ricardo’s cousins. It lists Ricardo’s contacts at the Geological
Society and ideas on scientific method circulating among geologists. It ends with the
suggestion that, when historians of economic thought have believed it proper to try to
take a trans-disciplinary look at the history of economic science, they have bought the
history of science wholesale and drawn comparisons between Newtonian Astronomy
and classical political economy. However, both political economy and geology date
their origins at about the same time. Ricardo’s contacts are reconstructed, including
Francis Horner, whom he first met at the Geological Society and was the first source of
encouragement to write on economic subjects.

Keywords

Chemistry; Mineralogy; Geology; British Scientific Societies; Geology and Theological

Controversy; Geology and the Scientific Method

5. Ricardo’s encounter with philosophers and political economists

This chapter discusses intellectual partnerships Ricardo established from the time he
started cultivating economic studies. It discusses Ricardo’s meeting with Francis
Horner at the Geological Society and its impact on the beginning of his career in political
economy. It discusses the relationship with Belsham and argues possible familiarity on
Ricardo’s side with topics from the Hartley-Priestley philosophy in language,
epistemology, ethics and politics. It reconstructs the origins of the myth of Ricardo’s
dependence on Bentham through Mill, examines their shared political commitments
and reconstructs Ricardo’s increasingly critical attitude to Mill in ethics and politics and
his master-to-pupil attitude to Mill in economic subjects. Then it offers an overview of
the controversy with Malthus, highlighting the strong effects it had on Ricardo’s line of
enquiry. A similar overview is offered of the correspondence with Say, highlighting
some influence exerted by Say in a first phase and the deadlock into which the
correspondence was trapped because of mutual misunderstanding on the topic of
utility and value.

Keywords

Newtonianism; Scottish Philosophy; Hartley-Priestley Philosophy; Benthamite

Philosophy
6. Ricardo on logic and political economy

This chapter illustrates how Ricardo’s ‘cast of mind’ resulted from several influences
absorbed at distinct phases in his intellectual evolution. In logic and epistemology, he
owed virtually nothing to Bentham and Mill. He may have learnt philosophical ideas
from discussions about Geology, as reflected in Kirwan’s Elements, for example, the
importance of precise terminology, constant need to correct gross indications of
unassisted senses and the need to try to attain the same precision as that of algebraic
formulas. He may have picked up other ideas from Belsham on language and method:
the desirability of explicit definitions, the need to keep the complexity of causal
interactions in mind, the need to stick to mono-causal explanations. He may have learnt
from Horner that we should avoid the practical men’s hasty generalisations and
distinguish between limited experience and transitory effects, on the one hand, and
permanent regularities, on the other.

He shared with Malthus the ‘Newtonian’ lesson, a generally accepted view of science as
the art of establishing principles from qualified observation, a basis made of universal
facts as contrasted with apparent or transitory phenomena, which Ricardo calls
‘permanent causes’. He differed from Malthus in emphasising the limits to human
knowledge, in mistrusting causal explanations and restricting science to ‘general laws’.

Keywords

Limited Scepticism; Scientific Terminology; Scientific Laws; Causality; Strong Cases;

Utility

7. Ricardo on ethics and political economy

Ricardo was not a utilitarian. He was instead a critic of utility, consequentialism, self-
interest. His ethics was based on good readings, including Bayle, Montesquieu, Adam
Smith and Paley. He had it clear that there are universal moral principles neither
dependent on positive religion nor derived from the felicific calculus, ‘moral
impressions’ are the first source of moral judgement, the rational search of happiness
is the ‘rule of life’ whose beneficence is a crucial part.

He assumed that human nature is complex, not governed only by pain and pleasure but
also by imagination and desire for sympathy. He was aware that happiness is a complex
and unstable condition, and the mirroring relationship between individuals plays an
important role.

He endorsed unlimited toleration, believed that good government is secured by

representative institutions and a system of checks and balances that makes the interest
of those in power coincide with those of the citizens.
 He believed that the science of political economy highlights the general laws regulating
the economy. The legislator is free to pursue ends dictated by a sense of justice within
the bounds of what is possible. Removing legislation and institutions distorting the
market would strengthen the labourers’ bargaining power.

Ricardo believed that theodicy is a question without an answer. His cautious attitude
vis-à-vis the social question depends on an awareness of the limits to human
knowledge. He sided with the poor but with caution dictated by awareness of the
additional misery any significant change unavoidably carries.

Keywords

Ethical Theory; Happiness; Natural Morality; Utilitarianism; Religion and Morality;

Limited Scepticism; Theology; Theodicy; Toleration; Just War; Social Justice

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