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Before Method and Models

The Political Economy of Malthus and Ricardo

Ryan Walter author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:25th Oct '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Before Method and Models cover

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.

Walter's book valuably draws attention to the deep ethical concern surrounding the production of theoretical knowledge * Jon Cooper, Oeconomia *
The book illustrates the displacement of the subfield of the history of economics from economics proper to intellectual history-a development already noted in 1969 by Alexander Gerschenkron, who wrote: "The Department of Physics at Harvard has completely eliminated history of physics from its curriculum; such history has been shifted to an independent History of Science Department. By contrast, in the Department of Political Science, history of political thought is still the daily bread of the discipline. Today's economics finds itself between those extremes, but certainly not in the middle. We are getting closer and closer to physics" * Alain Alcouffe, Journal of Modern History *

ISBN: 9780197603055

Dimensions: 160mm x 241mm x 20mm

Weight: 499g

266 pages