David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography

6 Ricardo on logic and political economy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162100-6

Ricardian rhetoric

Ricardo ‘was not enough master of logic to obtain precision, or even to estimate its importance’ (Senior 1836, p. 118), his work is marred by ‘inattention to established usage’ (p. 62) and ‘frequent inaccuracy of language’ (p. 118). Such is the court-martial verdict passed by Nassau William Senior, a member of the Oriel School, a group of Oxford academics who wanted to redefine political economy as a deductive science where introspection provides the ‘principles’ with which to start and deduction does the rest of the work. As happens in court-martials, the one shot at dawn was not the real felon. The fact is that the Oriel School was fighting the Ricardian ...