In his distinguished work on Philosophic Radicalism Halévy draws attention to the regret expressed by James Mill in the course of an article in The Edinburgh Review for October 1808 at “the great difficulty with which the salutary doctrines of political economy are propagated in this country”; adding that between 1776 and 1817 “not a single complete treatise on political economy appeared in England. Adam Smith remained the only authority, and he was little heeded.” Mill's views on doctrinal propagation may have been ambitious or he may have written in a pessimistic mood. But there was certainly nothing during this period approaching a “complete treatise” on the subject. (Even if Bentham's Manual of 1793–5 had come out, and been longer than it is, it would not have qualified since it was about policy and not theory.) This is not to say that there was not considerable activity and alertness in matters affecting political economy, especially in respect to pamphleteering on particular questions. To the latter class can be said to belong William Spence's Britain Independent of Commerce of 1808, and James Mill's answer to it in Commerce Defended of the same year; the latter being chiefly memorable for its sponsoring of ‘Say's Law’, as first propounded in J.-B. Say's Traité d'Économie Politique of five years before. The year 1798, moreover, had seen Malthus's Essay on Population; while in the first decade of the new century articles on questions of political economy were not uncommon in The Edinburgh Review and were a topic of discussion among the cognoscenti.

At first sight it is very difficult to place J. S. Mill (1806–73) in the hierarchy of descent, especially in relation to the two branches, or lines of tradition, of which we spoke in the last chapter. From one aspect he was a direct lineal descendant of Ricardo, and according to his own statements and belief he was at the same time the defender of Ricardian doctrine against its critics and its elaborator. Certainly at the time he was regarded as the embodiment of Ricardian orthodoxy; and from 1848 until Marshall his Principles of Political Economy with some of their applications to social philosophy held a unique place as the accepted textbook on the subject. Bagehot spoke of his “monarchical influence” over his contemporaries, and said that from then on all students “see the whole subject with Mill's eyes”; adding that “they see in Ricardo and Adam Smith what he told them to see”. As son of James Mill, Ricardo's close friend at whose instigation the latter had written his Principles of 1817 and had entered Parliament, John Stuart as a youth had known Ricardo personally, had visited Gatcomb Park and been taken on walks by him; moreover he was trained in Political Economy by his father (at the age of 13) on Ricardo's Principles. At the same time he was by nature a systematiser and synthesiser (some would say eclectic); and in the Preface to his own book of 1848 he states it as his aim to write a treatise containing “the latest improvements which have been made in the theory”.

According to Professor Shackle the 1920s saw the opening of an “Age of Turmoil”, succeeding “the Age of Tranquillity … across the great divide of the 1914–18 war.” To most economists of the time the major theoretical innovations since then would appear to have been the so-called ‘Keynesian revolution’ (eclipsing the ‘Jevonian’) and the attempt of Growth Theories from the 1940s onwards to supply something by way of an economic dynamics to redress previous concentration upon static equilibrium. These developments are commonly and alternatively described as a shift of focus back again from ‘microscopic’ phenomena to ‘macroscopic’, with which the classics were more largely concerned – to a concern with aggregates and with aggregate relations instead of with particular products and their individual prices. The two events following in fairly quick succession, the one upon the other, were clearly not unconnected, since interest in the wider horizon was implied in Keynesian preoccupation with levels of aggregate output and employment; and it was an easy and rather obvious passage from examining the determinants of the level of output in macroscopic perspective to examining the reasons why the level of output changed.

To these two developments some would no doubt feel inclined to add two others as being worthy of comparable emphasis. First, the new theory of ‘imperfect competition’ and ‘monopolistic competition’ (associated especially with the names of Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin) deserves to be regarded as an outstanding landmark on the horizon of the inter-war decades.

Jevons completed that reaction against Ricardo of which we have earlier spoken, as is implied by common association of a revolution in economic thought with his name; and although Menger could be said to have represented this break with classical tradition even more clearly and completely, Jevons was apparently more conscious of the rôle he was playing in reshunting the “car of economic science” which Ricardo had so perversely directed “onto a wrong line”. The appearance of his work only a few years after the first volume of Das Kapital makes it tempting to regard the former as a direct answer to the latter, prompted as much by contemplation of this latter-day progeny of Ricardo as the innovations of the Senior–Longfield school had been by the more jejune conclusions of the ‘Ricardian socialists’. But there is no evidence that Jevons had this consciously in mind, or even that he was aware of Marx's work: since the latter was published somewhat obscurely in Hamburg, it is highly unlikely, indeed, that Jevons had come across it, and at any rate Jevons's main ideas were formed at least ten years earlier (probably during his years in Australia) and embodied in a paper to the British Association in 1862. With the Austrians it was different, especially in the case of Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk, who was not only fully aware of the work of Marx as well as of the social backwash of Lassallean propaganda, but was even in some degree obsessed with its potential appeal.

The underlying preoccupation of the early economists of the age of Adam Smith was the notion of individual self-interest as the economic driving-force. From this was fashioned the general conception of an economic system propelled by a momentum of its own, and its motions shaped by specific economic laws that it was the unique contribution of classical political economy to disclose and establish. In Hegel's well-known phrase, “out of the actions of men comes something different from what they have consciously willed and intended”. The idea of the potentially creative force of individual self-interest harks back to the “private vices public virtues” of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (despite Adam Smith's dismissal of this as “wholly pernicious”); it is of course the substantial kernel within the metaphysical husk of Smith's “unseen hand”; and to this even the Theory of Moral Sentiments was germane as being concerned with exploring human motivation, which was the core of the self-acting bourgeois order. This demonstration of a mechanism within the affairs of men, with which uncomprehending meddling of sovereign or statesmen was incompatible, was the crucial innovation in human thinking about society, essentially replacing older thinking couched in terms of ‘natural right’, and not continuing it as has sometimes been alleged. As Lord Robbins has said, although Smith “so frequently uses the terminology of Naturrecht”, his “arguments are so consistently utilitarian in character”.

Around the question of the so-called ‘ideological’ element in economic theory (as of social theory in general) there has been in recent times increasing debate. In entering this debate at this stage it would be tedious to start by embarking on a genealogy and a quest for unique and precise definition of the term. On this let it suffice for the moment to say that, while the concept bears a close relationship to the Hegelian ‘false consciousness’ that serves to obstruct man's vision of himself and of his conditions of existence, it is not to be taken as synonymous therewith, still less as referring exclusively to the delusive element in thought (as some have indeed used it). Its central reference, undoubtedly, is to the historically-relative character of ideas, whether this be regarded as no more than an element or aspect of them or as characterising them in their entirety. But such historical relativity may embrace both insight and partiality, and this perhaps from the very nature of the situation, in a way that defies any complete analytical separation. It will be this reference, at any rate, that we shall have principally in mind in what follows. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add, further, that when the word, ‘ideology’, is used, this must necessarily refer to a whole system of thought, or coordinated set of beliefs and ideas, which form a framework, or higher-level group of related concepts, for more specific and particular notions, analyses, applications and conclusions.

In the years following Ricardo's death a considerable volume of criticism of his doctrine accumulated, and such was its impact, already before the end of the decade, as to make one wonder whether respect for his doctrine would have continued to be anything like so great as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century without the loyal championship (as well as popularisation) of his main doctrines by John Stuart Mill. By 1831, indeed, the Political Economy Club was holding a discussion on the question (tabled by Torrens) “whether any of the principles first advanced” in Mr Ricardo's work are “now acknowledged to be correct”; Torrens affirming in the discussion that “all the great principles of Ricardo's work have been successively abandoned, and that his theories of Value, Rent and Profits were now generally acknowledged to have been erroneous”.

Already in Ricardo's lifetime, of course, there had been rival poles of doctrine. Most definite and outspoken in its conservatism we have seen was the Earl of Lauderdale, no negligible economic thinker and one who swam boldly against the incoming tide of Smithianismus. Not only was he in policy protectionist, at least so far as the Corn Laws were concerned, but a leading pre-occupation with him was to denounce the “baneful passion for accumulation that has been falsely denominated virtue” and to demonstrate “the full extent of the evil that must arise from indulging” it.

We have seen that there were critics of post-Ricardian trends, particularly as regards the theory of profits, who tried to carry Ricardian theory further and to turn it into a critique of Capital itself. These were writers and pamphleteers like Thomas Hodgskin and William Thompson and J. F. Bray and John Gray, to whom the name of ‘Ricardian Socialists’ has been given; and although they inhabited what Keynes, a century later, was to call the “underworld of heretics”, their significance did not go unnoticed by economists of gentry-breed in Dublin or Oxford. Although their audience was to be found in Mechanics Institutes and among incipient trade unions and radical fraternities, rather than in the cloisters of ancient universities, their actual or potential influence was evidently feared by writers such as Scrope and Read.

Hodgskin presented his rather undeveloped concept of exploitation from the standpoint of a believer in a Smithian ‘natural harmony’ of natural laws; and from this standpoint he was a critic of Ricardo, especially the latter's theory of wages and theory of rent. His claim that labour had a right to the whole produce, and that profit and rent were alike filched from labour, was essentially a natural right doctrine, such as Marx's surplus-value is commonly, but erroneously, interpreted as being. Natural right to property in the fruit of one's own labour was sharply contrasted with ‘the legal or artificial’ right of property to appropriate the product of the labour of others.

It is always difficult to date the birth of a particular set of ideas or trend of thought, and perhaps even harder when this represents a critical reaction against traditional doctrine and an integrated system of related concepts. Any doctrinal innovation has its precursors, its unknown and at the time neglected fore-runners, as we have seen to have been the case with the ‘Jevonian revolution’. Commonly the crucial moment in the theoretical process comes as a synthesis, ‘mediation’ or ‘over-coming’ of previous, more partial criticism, or of ‘false starts’ and incomplete attempts to explore some new perspective and angle of approach. The real novelty may well be the posing of a new question, or of old questions in a novel way, quite as much as finding the convincing answer. The crucial turning-point, however, is not difficult as a rule to identify in retrospect, even if at the time its significance may have passed unnoticed.

Revival of interest in the classical economists of the Ricardian age may well have had a joint parentage in the shift of focus towards ‘macroscopic’ questions of which we have already spoken and the new light on Ricardian doctrine represented by Piero Sraffa's edition of the Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo of the early 1950s (especially the novel interpretations of Ricardo's theory of profit and of his search for an invariable measure of value, modestly embodied in the editor's General Introduction).