David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography

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, ...