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Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations
Gilbert Faccarello and Masashi Izumo ∗
It is always fascinating to see how the writings and ideas of authors — be they
philosophers or scientists — are progressively taken into account, discussed,
accepted or rejected in their own countries according to various historical in-
tellectual circumstances. It is even more interesting to study how these writings
and ideas cross borders and spread across nations and through time, being dis-
cussed, rejected or accepted anew in totally different environments to those
prevailing in their home countries.
Yet this kind of inquiry, at least in the history of economic thought, is
still in its infancy. While some one-off studies have been published in the past,
large-scale research on the reception and dissemination of specific authors or
doctrines is rare 1and certainly needs to be developed. Not only does it shed
new light on the works in question, but it is also a powerful aid to understanding
the theories and contexts with which they often came into conflict. It highlights
the fact that the history of economic thought is not only the logical analysis
∗Panthéon-Assas University, Paris (G. Faccarello) and Kanagawa University, Yokohama
(M. Izumo). Emails: gilbert.faccarello@u-paris2.fr and izumo@kanagawa-u.ac.jp. Published
in Gilbert Faccarello and Masashi Izumo (eds), The Reception of David Ricardo in Conti-
nental Europe and Japan, London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 1-9.
1. See for example Delmas, Demals and Steiner 1995 on the international dissemination of
Physiocracy ; Tribe 2002 on the reception of the works of Adam Smith, and Kurz, Nishizawa
and Tribe 2011 on more specific topics. For some general reflections on the international
diffusion of economic thought, see Cardoso 2003 and the appended bibliography.
1
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 2
of certain corpuses, or the rigorous restatement of theoretical approaches, but
also an account of the non-linear developments of concepts, ideas and policies
according to the different national realities.
The present book is an attempt to go in this direction and to study the
reception and dissemination of the works of David Ricardo in various European
countries (French-speaking and German-speaking countries, Italy, Portugal,
Spain and Russia) and in Japan, the discourse being even wider if we take
into account the role of some Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina,
Mexico) in the case of Portugal and Spain. The chapters collected here were
presented at a conference organized in Kyoto by the Ricardo Society Japan
in March 2012 2— ‘The reception and diffusion of Ricardo : an international
comparison’ — and rewritten for this publication.
1The nature of the project
Two centuries after the publication of Ricardo’s major works, and while so
much has been written on the different elements of Ricardo’s doctrine, it is
high time that we had a precise idea of their effective reception. The case of
Great Britain has been investigated while studying the important theoretical
developments and controversies that took place there during the 19th century.
But Britain attracted almost all the attention of scholars, and other countries
have been largely neglected. Moreover, students of the history of economic
thought were gradually taught a strange success story — the result of decades
of retrospective illusions. As an example of such an account, let us refer to
the introduction Paul Beauregard wrote in 1888 for the first — and unique —
abridged edition of the French translation of Ricardo’s Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation.3After reassessing the main points of Ricardo’s theory
of value and distribution, he remarks :
2. This conference is part of a series of seminars and meetings around David Ricardo and
classical political economy financed, since April 2010 and for 5 years, by a Grant-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (A) No. 22243019 of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences
(JSPS). The authors of the chapters of the present book gratefully thank the organizers and
the participants for helpful comments and discussions.
3. For the history of the French translations of the works of Ricardo, see Chapter 1 below.
In general, for extensive developments of the topics alluded to in this introduction, please
see each relevant chapter of this book.
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 3
When the book was published in 1817 it was prodigiously success-
ful. It was an event and it seemed that the science of economics was
disclosed for the first time. Of course there was some resistance :
Malthus had reservations and our J.-B. Say vigorously fought some
of Ricardo’s doctrines. But critiques remained few and went almost
unnoticed amidst general applause . . . . J. Mill and, after him, the
main economists in England declared they were Ricardo’s disciples.
The doctrine became orthodox and they were tempted to despise
those who dared oppose. This was no transient success : the work
is still a classic and one can say that, from 1817 until today, the
history of an important part of political economy has been the very
history of Ricardo’s book. (Beauregard 1889 : xx-xxi)
Of course, this statement echoes the celebrated passage of the Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater — quoted by Beauregard — where Thomas De
Quincey describes how deeply he was impressed when he read Ricardo’s Prin-
ciples in 1818. But Beauregard generalized this reaction, making it appear to
be the general opinion not only in Britain but implicitly also in France and
Europe. Of course, he admitted, the interest in Ricardo’s writings faded away
over time because economists realized that some predictions, or rather alleged
predictions — especially the evolution of the distribution of income between
rent, profits and wages — had not been fulfilled, and also because, after the
publication of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, Ricardo became the “prisoner” of the
socialists. But in the end, this qualification sounds minor and does not weaken
the overall impression of the immediate success of Ricardo’s approach and its
triumphant march through most of the 19th century. Beauregard’s account
may be highly sketchy, it was nevertheless shared afterwards in various forms
by many scholars.
However, the studies collected in the present book tell an entirely different
story. The reception of Ricardo, at least in continental Europe — the case of
Japan being more specific — had nothing of this triumphant march, and the
success, if any, was not immediate. Why this was so depended of course on
the peculiar intellectual and political situation of each country. Our purpose is
therefore to outline a much more exact picture of what actually happened.
The study of Ricardo’s international reception first raises the question of
the availability of his texts. The writings of Ricardo could of course be read
in their original English versions. At the beginning of the 19th century, this
was the case in Switzerland, and more precisely in Geneva, where the active
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 4
group around the periodical Bibliothèque Britannique — then the Bibliothèque
Universelle — paid great attention to everything that was published in Great
Britain. This was also the case with Jean-Baptiste Say in France, and some
prominent Spanish and Portuguese émigrés : the best examples being those
of the Portuguese intellectual Francisco Solano Constâncio, who translated
Ricardo’s Principles . . . into French in 1819, and of the Spaniard Alvaro Flórez
Estrada, who published his Curso de economia política in London in 1828. But
those who could read the original versions of Ricardo’s writings were in fact
a tiny minority who had, moreover some direct link with England. For wider
diffusion, translations were needed.
The French translations were the first available and played an important
role in the reception of Ricardo’s ideas in Europe. As early as 1810, the French
version of the third edition of The High Price of Bullion was published in three
instalments in a newspaper, La Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel. In
1817 and 1818 excerpts from the first chapter of the Principles were inserted,
with comments, in the Genevan Bibliothèque Universelle, and, in 1819, the
first edition of the book was published in French in Paris, with critical notes
by Jean-Baptiste Say. Almost three decades later, in 1847, the translation was
revised and republished, allegedly on the third edition, with many other works
by Ricardo, under the title Œuvres complètes de David Ricardo.
Another case of early translation was the German version of the first edition
of the Principles, published in 1821. The second edition was not translated until
1837, and the third in 1877. In the other countries studied in the present book,
the first translations of the full text of the Principles were slower to arrive :
1856 in Italian, 1873 in Russian, 1921 in Japanese, 1932 in Spanish and 1975
in Portuguese, although excerpts were published in 1848 in Spanish and in
1938 in Portuguese. There were also other ways to come into contact with
the Ricardian approach, especially through the various translations of James
Mill’s Elements of political economy, John Ramsay McCulloch’s Principles of
Political Economy and, some decades later, John Stuart Mill’s Principles of
Political Economy, which were more adapted to a large audience than Ricardo’s
own works.
But the dates of the translations do not tell the whole story, and their
late publication in most countries, while meaningful, is far from decisive. As a
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 5
matter of fact, during a significant part of the 19th century, the French language
was still dominant among cultivated people on the continent, and the French
editions played an important role in the reception of Ricardo’s ideas. As is
stated clearly in the chapters on Portugal, Spain, Italy and Russia — but also
that on Germany and Austria — the French editions circulated widely among
economists in these countries.
The question of the first availability of translations inevitably raises the
issue of their quality. We can easily imagine that at the beginning of the 19th
century, with Smith’s and Say’s prose in mind, it was not easy to understand
and translate Ricardo’s much more precise and abstract developments. And on
this point the picture is not rosy. While widely circulated and read, the French
translations of some of Ricardo’s works — especially the 1819-1835 editions of
the Principes de l’économie politique et de l’impôt — proved to be approximate
and even defective, and it is likely that some important aspects of Ricardo’s
doctrines — the theory of rent for example — were misunderstood because
of this. Unfortunately, the 19th-century German translations were apparently
even worse, with the same consequences. German-speaking readers had to wait
until 1905 to have an accurate version of the Principles.
If we discard this problem of accuracy, the reception of Ricardo also depen-
ded on the intellectual and political circumstances prevailing in the different
countries. Ricardo’s writings did not reach their readers in a vacuum : many
currents of thought already occupied the space. Cameralism, for example, was
still important in Austria. The so-called “use-value school” developed in Ger-
many, which later saw the emergence of the two German historical schools. In
France, the works of Jean-Baptiste Say and his interpretation of Adam Smith
were predominant and the writings of ‘outsiders’ like Jean-Charles-Léonard Si-
monde de Sismondi also played an important role. This means that, generally
speaking, Ricardo’s ideas arrived in countries where a different approach to po-
litical economy predominated, roughly based on a supply and demand frame-
work and thus a priori hostile to his doctrines of value and income distribution,
although his view on money was generally considered more sympathetically.
In this theoretical landscape, Say’s writings were central, and in particular
the notes he appended to the French translation of the Principles. If we add
the fact that, for the major part of the 19th century, Say and the French liberal
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 6
economists exerted great intellectual influence abroad — through their many
books and treatises but also, from the 1840s on, through the Société d’économie
politique, the Journal des économistes and the Dictionnaire de l’économie poli-
tique — it is easy to understand that for a time, their specific vision of Ricardo
shaped the reception of Ricardo in other countries. Other French thinkers had
also exerted some influence, to a lesser degree : Sismondi, for example, Jean-
Paul Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont and his Christian political economy, and
some socialist writers. But they all held a critical attitude towards Ricardo.
This does not mean that, in the different countries, one author or another did
not adopt some of Ricardo’s ideas. Nor does it mean that there were no Ricar-
dians at all but they almost always had some reservations, like Pellegrino Rossi
in France, Francesco Fuoco in Italy, or Karl Heinrich Rau in Germany. The
case of Japan is particular, since the works of Ricardo were introduced there
very late, when they were already considered part of the history of economic
thought.
The history of the reception of Ricardo’s writings concerns not only the
geographical dissemination of his ideas, but also the positions the readers held
in their own countries — were they teachers, journalists, politicians, etc. ? —
and, inextricably, time. In the different countries, the specific intellectual and
political events during the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century played a
part and most often dictated the choice of the topics which, in Ricardo’s works,
were to attract attention : the theory of rent, the inverse relation between wages
and profits, money and banking, the theory of value and prices, etc. This is
particularly true for Portugal and Spain, where the political turmoils and the
sporadic emigration of intellectuals played an important role — some of them
lived for many years in England or France and may have had direct knowledge
of the writings published there and their authors. This is also striking for Italy
where, in late 19th century, almost only the monetary doctrines of Ricardo were
of interest to the majority of economists. And for all the European countries —
except perhaps France — and Japan at various moments in their 19th century
history, the critical attitude towards Ricardo’s Principles was rooted in an
awareness of the need to modernize their economy and to achieve important
reforms for the sake of development : in these circumstances Ricardo’s discourse
seemed too theoretical and abstract, unable to suggest suitable policies to cope
with such specific situations.
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 7
Last but not least, the consideration of time is obviously also important for
understanding the Ricardo revival in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, be-
fore the important wave of studies generated by the Sraffa edition of the Works
and Correspondence of David Ricardo — from 1951 on — and the publication
of his own Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities in 1960. This
first revival was due to Marx and the various Marxist currents of thought that
followed, especially in Germany and Russia where their influence was strong.
It presented two different aspects. On the one hand, some authors — like Yuli
Galaktionovich Zhukovsky, Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev and Ladislaus von
Bortkiewicz — were motivated by a genuine interest in Ricardo and published
valuable analyses which may have gone unnoticed at the time but were fortu-
nately rediscovered later on. The best example is Dmitriev’s Economic Essays
(1904), which were only brought out of oblivion by their French translation
in 1968. Although intellectually important, these authors were a minority. On
the other hand, as time went by and especially after the 1917 Revolution in
Russia, other authors read Ricardo more through Marxian spectacles, and his
theory of value and distribution was again studied in the perspective dictated
by the new Bible, Das Kapital. Isaak Illich Rubin is certainly one of the most
interesting of these authors. In a sense, Beauregard was not wrong when he
wrote that they made Ricardo their prisoner — he could not have foreseen that
some decades later, a strange Italian émigré would set Ricardo free again.
2The content of the book
The studies included in this book have been approximately ordered according
to the chronology of the contact the different countries had with Ricardo’s
works.
Chapter 1, by Alain Béraud and Gilbert Faccarello, aims to provide a first
precise picture of the French reception of Ricardo’s works and ideas. Limiting
the study to the first three-quarters of the 19th century, it concentrates on
some of the most important debates in which Ricardo’s ideas were discussed.
After setting the stage and describing the intellectual context of this reception,
the chapter presents the various translations and editions of Ricardo’s writings
in the French language. It then deals with some methodological aspects of
Ricardo’s approach to political economy — mainly his “abstract” theoretical
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 8
way of thinking — in general heavily criticized by the French authors. The
following sections are devoted to more specific topics : value and wealth, rent,
money and banking, and finally Say’s law of markets and crises. On all these
points, the reception was rather hostile and critical. On the whole, Ricardo’s
ideas were received in a theoretical context marked by Turgot and Say and
a widely-accepted French adaptation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in
a supply and demand framework. This does not mean that Ricardo was not
influential in France, but his legacy was fragmented, and some economists
only retained the aspects of Ricardo’s doctrines that were of interest to them,
discarding or criticizing the rest. Ricardo was also influential in another, more
diffuse way. His writings obliged certain authors to react to and discuss his
ideas, thereby also driving them to clarify and develop their own theories.
This was obviously the case for Say and Sismondi — who had furthermore the
opportunity to discuss directly with the author of the Principles.
Chapter 2, by Christian Gehrke, reviews some of the more important Ger-
man contributions to the development of the classical approach to value and
distribution in the century from the publication of Ricardo’s Principles in 1817
to the beginning of the Great War in 1914. After providing an overview of the
German editions and early German book reviews of Ricardo’s Principles and
a summary account of the development of the German economic discourse in
this period, the role of the German historical schools in the demise of Ricardian
economics in the German-speaking countries is briefly discussed. Then two dif-
ferent lines in the further elaboration of Ricardo’s approach to the theory of
value and distribution are examined in greater detail, focusing on the contribu-
tions of F. B. W. Hermann and Johann-Carl Rodbertus. The final two sections
offer a critical assessment of the contributions of Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz
and Georg von Charasoff, and of their critique of Marx’s attempt to elaborate
on Ricardo’s analysis of prices and income distribution.
Chapter 3, by José Luís Cardoso, is devoted to the diffusion and appro-
priation of Ricardo’s thought in Portugal and explains why it was limited and
confined to a small number of authors. After presenting a descriptive account
of the reading of Ricardo during the period under analysis, the chapter empha-
sizes the role of Solano Constâncio, a Portuguese émigré who lived most of his
active life in Paris and who translated Ricardo’s Principles into French. Howe-
ver, Constâncio was also responsible for the spread, among Portuguese readers,
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 9
through his essays and reviews, of a critical view of the alleged universal and
abstract principles of political economy usually associated with Ricardo and
Ricardian economics, which may be considered one of the main causes of the
limited influence of Ricardo in Portugal during the first half of the nineteenth
century. This chapter also describes how, having lost the opportunity to be
influential during the period of the hegemony of classical economics, Ricar-
do’s thought and Ricardian economics alike have not attracted thorough and
competent interpretation by Portuguese economists in more recent periods.
Chapter 4. This chapter, by Salvador Almenar, examines the reception and
dissemination of Ricardo’s theories in Spain, distinguishing different channels,
forms and degrees. It first deals with the period up to 1834. Ricardo was
known in Spain through the French translation of the Principles and, above
all, indirectly through authors such as James Mill, or the critical comments
by Sismondi and Say. It then examines the case of Alvaro Flórez Estrada
(1766-1853), because of his singular reception and reformulation of the ideas of
Ricardo, McCulloch and Mill in his Curso de economía política — which had
seven editions between 1828 and 1853. Flórez accepted the Ricardian theories
of distribution and development, but he modified the model by proposing a
regular process of improvement in agriculture and by expanding the analysis
of the incidence of a land tax. His influence in Spain and Latin America was
important during the 1830s and 1840s. This chapter finally presents some other
attitudes adopted by Spanish economists towards Ricardo between 1834 and
1868 : simple ignorance, partial and explicit criticism, or systematic refutation.
Chapter 5, by Anna La Bruna and Annalisa Rosselli, enquires as to whether
Ricardo’s monetary thought and theory of value met with different fortunes
in Italy in the 19th century. The authors argue that at the theoretical level it
is legitimate to separate the destiny of Ricardo’s ideas on money from that of
his ideas on value and distribution. They show that Ricardo’s views on mo-
ney enjoyed a wider and more favourable reception than those on value and
distribution, but ultimately they were no better understood or endorsed, since
neither the historical situation nor the approach to economics favoured their
acceptance. To support this conclusion, the authors outline the main mone-
tary issues that were discussed in Italy subsequent to independence in 1861,
the major laws proposed or approved to solve them, and the protagonists of the
debates they entailed. After a summary of the main conclusions of Ricardo’s
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 10
theory that are relevant to the issues debated in Italy, the influence of Ricardo
on the monetary debates in Italy in the 19th century is discussed, with parti-
cular focus on the controversy of the late 1870s. The authors show that, unlike
Ricardo’s approach, the Italian debate was developed at the microeconomic
level : the differences between protagonists concerned the factors that affect
the preferences of individual agents for different kinds of money.
Chapter 6, by Denis Melnik, reviews the three periods in the development of
economic science in Russia during the last two centuries. For different reasons,
these periods provided an unfavorable context for the reception of Ricardo’s
economic ideas. In the first period, for about half of the 19th century, the
name of Ricardo was not unknown, but his theory attracted no attention. In
the second period, which started in the 1860s and ended with the Russian
Revolution, the consensus towards Ricardo among the majority of Russian
economists was based on a respectful distance. Still, there were some attempts
to update Ricardo’s economics to Russia. Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber, the first
translator of Ricardo into Russian, regarded his theory as a preceding stage to
Marx’s, while Yuli Galaktionovich Zhukovsky, who rejected Marxism from the
very beginning, made an attempt to reformulate Ricardo’s theory in terms not
dissimilar to the later neoclassical interpretation. The subsequent rise of margi-
nalism and the heated debates among Marxists at the turn of the 20th century
resulted in endeavours to ‘synthesize’ classical and marginalist approaches to
value and distribution characteristic of a number of Russian economists : this
was the background to Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev’s original interpretation.
In the third period, during the Soviet era, the canonical version of the history
of economic thought placed Ricardo as an immediate predecessor of Marx. By
comparing the approaches to Ricardo’s economics proposed by Isaak Illich Ru-
bin and Piero Sraffa, the author outlines the difference between the two lines
of development of the classical approach during the twentieth century.
Chapter 7, by Masashi Izumo and Shigemasa Sato, describes the reception
and diffusion of Ricardo in Japan from 1869 to 2012. Although it cannot avoid
being selective, it singles out those studies that best illustrate the reception of
Ricardo’s works and the main currents in Japanese Ricardo studies. The chap-
ter deals with two distinct periods, each starting with a major event which
had a deep impact on Japanese society : the Meiji Restoration and World War
II. During the first period, i.e., during the late 19th and early 20th century,
Ricardo’s travels into several remote nations 11
a wide range of translations of Western economic writings played a signifi-
cant role in advancing and developing economic thought in Japan. But, in this
context, the introduction of Ricardo was late compared with J. S. Mill, Mal-
thus, Smith, Say, Marshall, Jevons, List and Marx : it is shown how studies of
Ricardo, both from the Marshallian and from the Marxian points of view, were
introduced into Japan in the 1910s and then passed on to later generations of
scholars. For the second period, i.e., from 1945 to the present, particular atten-
tion is paid to certain Japanese studies of some controversial interpretations
of Ricardo — for example Sraffa’s interpretation of early Ricardo in terms of
a ‘corn-ratio theory’, or the question of whether or not Ricardo’s theory of
money departs from the classical quantity theory — thus providing possible
interesting comparisons with analogous debates abroad.
References
Beauregard, Paul (1889). ‘Introduction’. In David Ricardo, Rente, salaires et
profits. Paris : Guillaumin, pp. i-xxviii.
Cardoso, José Luís (2003). ‘The international diffusion of economic thought’.
In Warren Samuels, Jeff Biddle and John Davis (Eds.), A Companion to the
History of Economic Thought. Oxford and New York : Blackwell, pp. 622-633.
Delmas, Bernard, Thierry Demals and Philippe Steiner (editors) (1995). La
diffusion internationale de la physiocratie (XVIIIe-XIXe). Grenoble : Presses
Universitaires de Grenoble.
Kurz, Heinz D., Tamotsu Nishizawa and Keith Tribe (editors) (2011). The
dissemination of economic ideas. Cheltenham : Edward Elgar.
Tribe, Keith (editor) (2002). A critical bibliography of Adam Smith. London :
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