A robust study of US legal history from the Constitution to Reconstruction shows up the myth of laissez faire in the US. Ditto for a study of English and French legal history. When Ricardo wrote "to determine the laws..." he was speaking of the legal/policy regime[s] of control rather than some nomological invariants to be discovered by political economists.
Thanks for the comment. I think the accepted view, as represented by Sraffa's scholarship on Ricardo, suggests that this is not the case.
The full quote, from the preface is: "To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy: much as the science has been improved by the writings of Turgot, Stuart, Smith, Say, Sismondi, and others, they afford very little satisfactory information respecting the natural course of rent, profit, and wages." He was talking about regularities that could be understood like in Newtonian mechanics. You could say something about what happened to profits if wages changed. The natural course, as he says.
As he said to Malthus, “Political Economy you think is an enquiry into the nature and causes of wealth; I think it should rather be called an enquiry into the laws which determine the division of the produce of industry amongst the classes who concur in its formation. No law can be laid down respecting quantity, but a tolerably correct one can be laid down respecting proportions. Every day I am more satisfied that the former enquiry is vain and delusive, and the latter only the true object of the science.”
It is the same reason he does not discuss in his book the commodities "the value of which is determined by scarcity alone." There are no regularities about them, and they cannot be discussed in a scientific way. Then, "In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint." So it is about laws of general character about the production of reproducible commodities.
Marx critique, to a great extent, would be to this naturalization of what he saw as historically constrained aspects of capitalism.
I apologize for the long quotes, but these have some bearing on his views on science, and scientific laws.
A robust study of US legal history from the Constitution to Reconstruction shows up the myth of laissez faire in the US. Ditto for a study of English and French legal history. When Ricardo wrote "to determine the laws..." he was speaking of the legal/policy regime[s] of control rather than some nomological invariants to be discovered by political economists.
Hi Ian:
Thanks for the comment. I think the accepted view, as represented by Sraffa's scholarship on Ricardo, suggests that this is not the case.
The full quote, from the preface is: "To determine the laws which regulate this distribution, is the principal problem in Political Economy: much as the science has been improved by the writings of Turgot, Stuart, Smith, Say, Sismondi, and others, they afford very little satisfactory information respecting the natural course of rent, profit, and wages." He was talking about regularities that could be understood like in Newtonian mechanics. You could say something about what happened to profits if wages changed. The natural course, as he says.
As he said to Malthus, “Political Economy you think is an enquiry into the nature and causes of wealth; I think it should rather be called an enquiry into the laws which determine the division of the produce of industry amongst the classes who concur in its formation. No law can be laid down respecting quantity, but a tolerably correct one can be laid down respecting proportions. Every day I am more satisfied that the former enquiry is vain and delusive, and the latter only the true object of the science.”
It is the same reason he does not discuss in his book the commodities "the value of which is determined by scarcity alone." There are no regularities about them, and they cannot be discussed in a scientific way. Then, "In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint." So it is about laws of general character about the production of reproducible commodities.
Marx critique, to a great extent, would be to this naturalization of what he saw as historically constrained aspects of capitalism.
I apologize for the long quotes, but these have some bearing on his views on science, and scientific laws.
Matías