David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography

Sergio Cremaschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367753450
• eBook ISBN: 9781000475791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

David Ricardo has been acclaimed – or vilified – for merits he would never have dreamt of, or sins for which he was entirely innocent. Entrenched mythology labels him as a utilitarian economist, an enemy of the working class, an impractical theorist, a scientist with 'no philosophy at all' and the author of a formalist methodological revolution. Exploring a middle ground between theory and biography, this book explores the formative intellectual encounters of a man who came to economic studies via other experiences, thus bridging the gap between the historical Ricardo and the economist's Ricardo.

The chapters undertake a thorough analysis of Ricardo's writings in their context, asking who was speaking, what audience was being addressed, with what communicative intentions, using what kind of lexicon and communicative conventions, and starting with what shared knowledge. The work opens in presenting the different religious communities with which Ricardo was in touch. It goes on to describe his education in the leading science of the time – geology – before he turned to the study of political economy. Another chapter discusses five 'philosophers' – students of logic, ethics and politics – with whom he was in touch. From correspondence, manuscripts and publications, the closing chapters reconstruct, firstly, Ricardo's ideas on scientific method, the limits of the 'abstract science' and its application, and, secondly, his ideas on ethics and politics and their impact on strategies for improving the condition of the working class.

This book sheds new light on Ricardian economics, providing an invaluable service to readers of economic methodology, philosophy of economics, the history of economic thought, political thought and philosophy.

1 Ricardo’s Sepharad

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162100-1

‘Ricardo’s father and family were of the Jewish persuasion; blameless according to the Decalogue, and uncommonly strict in all the peculiarities of the Mosaic ritual. In the same faith he was himself initiated’ (Sunday Times 1823). This chapter attempts to reconstruct the first 21 years of Ricardo’s life when he was first a child in a London Sephardi household and then, from the age of 13, a member of the Bevis Marks congregation. Primary sources are scarce, primarily because Ricardo’s family did not like the idea ‘that the public should be reminded of their Jewish and mercantile origin’ (Mallet 1821–1822, 24 June 1830), but the chapter tries to add something to what is available on Ricardo’s formative years (Sraffa 1955, pp. 16–43, Heertje 1970, 1975, 2015; Weatherall 1976, pp. 1–21; Henderson 1997, pp. 51–154).

Twenty-one years in Ricardo’s life

The Memoir written by Ricardo’s brother Moses is the most detailed report we have on his early life, albeit unfortunately less detailed than Moses would have liked to write. According to a contemporary, John Lewis Mallet,

Mr Moses Ricardo, a brother of David Ricardo, and a man of information and intelligence who intended writing a Memoir of his brother, and was collecting materials for the purpose, has been prevailed upon by Ricardo’s family to abandon the undertaking; and I understand from him that their real objection to it is, that as they are now people of fortune and of some consequence, and landed gentry, they do not like that the public should be reminded of their Jewish and mercantile origin.

(Mallet 1821–182, 24 June 1830; cf. Sraffa 1955, p. 16)

Ricardo himself was far from enthusiastic about the idea of talking about his Jewish origins. The reasons were obvious. In Georgian England, Jews enjoyed a higher degree of integration than in any other European country, except for the Netherlands. Even so, there was a unique combination of comparatively liberal treatment at the legal and administrative level and ‘genteel intolerance’ through a perennial flood of ‘casual garden-party anti-Semitism’ (Endelman 2002, p. 247). Anti-Jewish gossip was a temptation even for the author of The Sunday Times obituary, a liberal, a fellow-Unitarian and a close friend who did not, however, refrain from alluding to Jewish greed and sectarian spirit. The response to such subtle intolerance was assimilation. It was a step-by-step process passing through such stages as a mixed marriage and having the children christened, followed by adoption of the Christian mother’s family name (Endelman 1999, pp. 257–258).

The tone of communication with non-Jewish partners was set by this climate, which ‘encouraged them to mute their Jewishness, rather than accept it naturally or even reveal it’ (Endelman 2002, p. 247; cf. Rubinstein 1996, pp. 60–66; Endelman 1999, pp. 86–117; Ruderman 2000, pp. 215–268) and encouraged the suppression of information about one’s background, and the adoption of ‘English’ linguistic and cultural patterns. Modesty about one’s skills was also advisable together with a constant attempt not to look too smart and, in case one could not help being so, not to show it around, for in England ‘cleverness was bad form’ (Ruderman 2000, p. 265). For these reasons we should read Ricardo’s and his contemporaries’ utterances in context, while bearing in mind not only contemporary and past events but also prevailing opinions. For example, when he complained that his education had been ‘neglected’ or that he ‘learned nothing’ during his stay in Amsterdam he was not addressing Sraffa, Weatherall, Heertje and Henderson but rather James Mill and Maria Edgeworth. When talking to the latter, the offspring of Anglo-Irish gentry, he may have been keen to avoid satisfying her curiosity vis-à-vis the exotic Judeo-Spanish world too much, a curiosity that was combined with a generous amount of sub-conscious prejudice, as revealed in the following comment in a letter to her mother:

I have hitherto escaped saying anything about jews – nothing as rich as a jew has ever passed my lips but I live in fear that I shall not get out of the house without stumbling upon some thing belonging to jews.

(Edgeworth 1971, p. 226)

The facts are that David was born in 1772 to Abigail Delvalle and Abraham Israel Ricardo, a wealthy Sephardi stockjobber born in Amsterdam in 1734, who had moved to London in 1760 and married the daughter of a respectable Sephardic family that had been living in England for three generations and had obtained British citizenship. Besides being an established businessman, the father became a Parnas, that is, an administrator of the Bevis Marks Synagogue (Hyamson 1951, pp. 437–439; Sraffa 1955, pp. 17–29). Abraham was a native speaker of Portuguese or Spanish (because of the family’s stay in Leghorn and then in Amsterdam for several generations) and Dutch, and had learnt English as an adult. Abigail was a Spanish native speaker fluent in English. Until the early nineteenth century, the vehicular language in the schools affiliated with the Bevis Marks synagogue was Judeo-Spanish or Portuguese (Hyamson 1951, pp. 172–317; Mitchell 2000, pp. 101–104; Kerner 2018, pp. 239–248). We know that Spanish was still alive in 1803 when chief Rabbi Isaac Mocatta, while stigmatising the congregation’s state of spiritual decay, insisted that English should substitute Spanish as the language of sermons. However, a rule to this effect had to wait until 1840 (Gaster 1901, p. 154).

Anglo-Judaism from 1600 to 1793

After the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and attempts to set up tiny clandestine communities of Marrano immigrants in the sixteenth century, a flow of Iberian Marranos to London started between 1632 and 1655. Cromwell tried to secure legal status for Jews in England and, though his attempt failed, a situation of de facto toleration came into being allowing the establishment of a burial ground and a synagogue in Creechurch Lane in 1657. Throughout the eighteenth century, a steadily growing Sephardi community headed by an elite of brokers and merchants became a part of the London landscape. In 1697 twelve ‘Jew Brokers’ were admitted to the Royal Exchange. Besides the Sephardi community, an Ashkenazi congregation also came into being, in 1690, and kept steadily growing due to immigration from Poland via Germany and the Netherlands. Yet even though they had their magnates and managed to erect a new main synagogue in 1722, they remained for a long time a lower-class group (Roth et al. 2007, pp. 180–181).

Despite the growth and expansion of the Sephardi Congregation, latent centrifugal tendencies made themselves felt. One source was the appeal of Modern European philosophical and scientific culture to which the elite had enjoyed access during their phase as Cristianos Nuevos or Christâos Novos when a few of them had studied at Portuguese Universities. The authorities’ temptation was to resort to disciplinary means to restore cohesion in a community made of members with varying degrees of orthodoxy. The Spinoza trial in Amsterdam was a symptom of a frenzy pushing authorities to the quite un-Jewish step of putting members’ orthodoxy on trial, a duplication of the Spanish Inquisition’s behaviour (Kaplan 2000, pp. 108–154). In London, sources of trouble were the same. The community came into being from an attempt to establish a foothold in London for the international Portuguese commercial network. It included people who felt themselves bound to this network by ethnic background and business partnerships but who had no intention of reverting to Judaism. It included others who resisted to the idea of abandoning their crypto-Jewish condition out of fear, habit or a desire to keep themselves free to return to Portugal. All this led to recurrent tension between the authorities and members or semi-members whose varying degrees of identification – or non-identification – went as far as stubborn resistance to circumcision (pp. 155–164). In a word,

the centrifugal tendencies active within it from the first left their mark on its character and substance and drove many of its members from the centre to the periphery. The routes towards assimilation and integration into the surrounding community were traced upon it from its very first days.

(p. 167)

Regulations of the London community established a duty to submit anything a member intended to publish in print – including calendars – to the authorities. Even staunch defence of Portuguese and Spanish was a side-effect of a policy of control over members and the erection of fences for protection from the outside world (Kerner 2018, pp. 239–248). The Sephardi Synagogue appointed a succession of Hahamim, chief rabbis, often coming from places as distant as Smyrna and Oran. As Judeo-Spanish remained the community’s main vernacular right up to the last decades of the eighteenth century, resettlement to London did not require of them a substantial effort to adapt to a new milieu. Those who published on theological or legal subjects went on writing in Hebrew and Spanish, with the consequence of preserving the existing insulation from the Christian English-speaking outside world.

In 1701 the new Bevis Marks Synagogue was dedicated, an achievement marking the beginning of a new era, culminating in the three decades of David Nieto’s magisterium (Roth et al. 2007, p. 180). Nieto, born in Venice in 1654, had been a physician and preacher in Leghorn and was then appointed as Haham in 1702 (Gaster 1901, pp. 129–130; Katz 1994, pp. 196–201; Ruderman 1995, pp. 310–331; Karem 2004; Petuchowski 2007; Mimran 2012). He published De la Divina Providencia, that is, On God’s Providence (Nieto 1704), a dialogue in good literary Spanish occasioned by the controversy aroused by a community member who had petitioned against him for professing Spinozism or Pantheism in his sermons. Another work, published in Hebrew and Spanish, was Matteh Dan ve Kuzari Helehk Shenì, or ‘The Rod of Dan and Second Part of the book of Kuzari’ (Nieto 1714) where he defends the Oral Law against the Karaites, an ancient Jewish sect whose doctrines, marked by rejection of the Talmud, was revived by former Marranos. A third work, also published in Hebrew and Spanish, is Esh Dat, o sea Fuego Legal, that is, ‘Fire of the Law’, which refuted Sabbatianism, a Jewish sect founded by self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi from Smyrna who announced the abolition of the Torah, that is, the Biblical Law (Nieto 1715).

On balance, his work was a remarkable attempt to respond to the challenge coming from modern science and philosophy by resorting to philosophical arguments to defend rabbinic Judaism without indulging in traditionalist attitudes. For example, he goes so far as to adopt Samuel Clarke’s denial of the distinction between miracles and natural events on the assumption that it is always God’s will to determine the order of nature. Still, while doing so, he enlists on his side a Jewish authority such as Yehuda ha-Levi. What is more, he fights non-Jewish philosophers with their own weapons, discussing Aristotle’s, Gassendi’s, Descartes’s and the chemical philosophers’ conception of matter to show that, since their views are in conflict with one another, one ‘cannot view any of them as certain but only as probable, plausible explanations of reality’ (Ruderman 1995, p. 324; Kerner 2018, pp. 239–248).

Echoes from the Haskalah

Nieto’s soon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Preface: Preface: Science, logic, ethics and theology in Ricardo’s intellectual biography
• 1 Ricardo’s Sepharad
• 2 Ricardo’s encounter with the Quakers
• 3 Ricardo’s encounter with the Unitarians
• 4 Ricardo’s encounter with geologists
• 5 Ricardo’s encounter with philosophers and political economists
• 6 Ricardo on logic and political economy
• 7 Ricardo on ethics and political economy
• Conclusions: a man from another planet
• Appendix
• Index