Good Terms: The style of Ricardian Political Economy

Abstract

This essay uses previously neglected sources to shed light on questions of style and readership within nineteenth-century political economy. Before the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), political economic writing was frequently attacked for its opacity. The approachable style of Mill’s Principles is credited with changing this. A number of critics have written about the stylistic break between John Stuart Mill’s economic writing and that of his clearest antecedents, James Mill and David Ricardo. By contrast this paper focuses on the continuities of the three thinkers’ efforts to find a way of writing about Ricardian political economy that would earn it broad acceptance with readers. The discussion is divided into two sections. The first section is based upon archival work in John Stuart Mill’s library, which has seldom been considered as a source of information. The extensive annotations made by James Mill in one of the books in the library are explored: Ricardo’s Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock (1815). In the annotations and elsewhere James Mill hopes to find a clearer, more convincing style for Ricardo’s theories while also seeking to shore up his own command of the subject. The second section expands on this theme by considering John Stuart Mill’s reflections on and continuation of James Mill’s efforts, chiefly in periodical writing in the 1820s—an interim period in political economy that is infrequently discussed by economic historians.

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