WILLIAM NASSAU SENIOR AND DAVID RICARDO ON THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the supposed agreement of David Ricardo and William Nassau Senior on the question of the method of political economy. The first part shows that Senior was very critical about Ricardo’s approach to economic phenomena and considered that this question of method had important consequences on theoretical points. The second part analyzes the way Ricardo was dealing with economics. It shows that though Senior was right in considering that their respective methods were different and led to important analytical divergences, he nevertheless misunderstood Ricardo’s method with a hypothetico-deductive one. The consequence is that Senior’s criticisms on Ricardo’s theories of rent, natural wages, and of the tendencies of agricultural returns to decrease and of profit to fall are ill-founded, being based on a misunderstanding of the way they were established.