The Unitarian Connection and Ricardo's Scientific Style

Christophe Depoortère, in “On Ricardo's Method: The Unitarian Influence Examined,” attacks two pages of our 1996 HOPE article. He asks two questions: (1) Was David Ricardo's conversion to Unitarianism sincere? and (2) Did Ricardo follow the methodology of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Belsham? His answers are that Ricardo was a religious skeptic and was not an empiricist like Priestley and Belsham. He adds that the Unitarian influence was “overrated” by Piero Sraffa.

Let us say first that Sraffa did rediscover Ricardo's Unitarianism but he underestimated its possible intellectual impact, and that we, not Sraffa, “overrated” those implications.

Second, let us remind the reader of our main point in this and three other essays (Cremaschi and Dascal 1998a, 1998b; Dascal and Cremaschi 1999). Most of Ricardo's and Thomas Malthus's methodological remarks are made in their correspondence, resulting from objections and countermoves. Since we believe that controversies contribute to intellectual progress, we set out to reconstruct their methodologies in the context of their controversy. In this way, it was possible to shed light on their different scientific styles and programs for the social sciences (see Cremaschi and Dascal 1998a).

Was Ricardo a Unitarian?

Depoortère argues that Ricardo was not a “real” Unitarian. His argument is: Ricardo was a religious skeptic→Ricardo was an atheist→Ricardo's conversion to the most liberal of the available religious options was a matter of convenience.

Reply: We are not concerned with Ricardo's sincerity, but with his association for many years with the proponents of peculiar philosophical views. Depoortère's argument, if sound, would be irrelevant. But it is also full of non sequiturs.

First, is there any evidence that Ricardo was faking his commitment to Unitarianism?

Second, the speech of Ricardo's that Depoortère mentions was in support of a petition whose “prime mover” was Robert Aspland, one of the two main Unitarian divines of the day!

Third, Priestley and Belsham, as well as Locke before them, had been using the same skeptical argument used by Ricardo, namely, that no one can judge the truth or falsity of religious beliefs on behalf of others.

Fourth, if Ricardo was a religious skeptic, this does not mean that he was a crypto-atheist. Ricardo was defending limited skepticism, or he was claiming that rational arguments are not decisive in matters of religious belief, which is much less than agnosticism or atheism. His admiration for Pierre Bayle would be a challenge for us only if Bayle were still assumed to be some kind of crypto-atheist, instead of a proponent of Christianity without theology, not far from the tradition of Socinianism, to which also the English Unitarians belong.

And finally, the difficulty in providing any solution to the problem of evil is precisely the point where the Unitarians converged with the Christian skeptic Bayle. According to Belsham (1826, 37), “When we consider the divine dispensations in detail, we shall immediately discover that they are far beyond the reach of human sagacity,” and he believed that the fact “that evil, natural and moral, is unavoidable in the works of God, is a problem of very difficult solution” (37). We face an “inexplicable difficulty” that the “wisdom of man in vain attempts to unravel and explore” (37). This sounds as skeptical as Bayle and as Ricardo's comment in his letter to James Mill. Shall we infer from the above statements that Belsham had ceased to be the leading Unitarian divine?

Did Ricardo “Follow” Belsham's Methodology?

Question 2 is not the right kind of question. What we contend is that neither Malthus nor Ricardo ever “applied” any ready-made method, and that—in spite of differences and misunderstandings—the main influence on Ricardo's theorizing came precisely from Malthus. Ricardo did not “follow” Belsham's and Priestley's method, but no economist ever followed anybody's method! The right...