Before Method and Models: The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo

A boldly revisionist history of the first disputes in nineteenth-century Britain over the role of economists in society

Economics now so dominates our understanding of how the world works that some of the field’s most influential concepts seem akin to natural laws. Yet economists themselves are a relatively recent species of intellectual, first emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And like the economists of our own era, the pioneering work of the early economists was decidedly a product of its time.

Before Method and Models looks back to the first disputes in nineteenth-century Britain over the role of economists in society to explain how the broader historical and intellectual context has always shaped the field. Ryan Walter’s boldly revisionist history focuses on Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, both of whom were attacked for producing a type of knowledge that was perceived to be dangerous to society. Rather than simply assuming that ＂classical political economy＂ always existed, Walter recovers the historical circumstances that actually shaped the development of their methods and concepts. The book delves into the major political controversies of the time - the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate - and the arguments that Malthus and Ricardo advanced in order to shape the outcome. By examining the hostile responses of Malthus and Ricardo’s contemporaries, the book shows how the major challenge facing the first economists was to legitimize the activity of theorizing and then reforming economic life.

In a time when debate about commerce and politics was conducted without our modern methods and models, Malthus and Ricardo fought for the creation of the new field of political economy and a role for their work at the center of politics. Walter’s reconstruction of the era reveals an exceedingly sophisticated debate regarding the costs and benefits of reforming both institutions and laws through the new science of political economy.

Ryan Walter is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Studies at University of Queensland.