Before Method and Models

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.