Last modified: 2018-06-21
Abstract
1.Ricardo’s education and his continuing education; 2. Chemistry after the phlogiston controversy; 3. Geology after the catastrophism-uniformitarianism controversy; 4. Richard Kirwan; 5. The London Geological Society; 6. Ricardo’s encounters at the Geological Society; 7. Ricardo and experimental farming; 8. Provisional conclusions: the bequest of geology to political economy.
Available biographical evidence is revised about the kind of education Ricardo received. Evidence concerning Ricardo’s early interest in the natural sciences, considered by Sraffa to have had deeper impact on Ricardo’s mind than Benthamite philosophy, is collected and interpreted. The circumstance highlighted by Rashid is discussed that geology was in those decades the front-page discipline because of its recent discoveries and the tremendous impact these had on religious issues such as the Creation of the world and the Bible’s trustworthiness. It reconstructs the contents of a book for boys on mineralogy by one of Ricardo’s cousins. It lists contacts Ricardo established at the Geological Society and ideas on scientific method circulating among geologists of the time, including Francis Horner, whom he first met at the Geological Society and was the first source of encouragement for Ricardo’s writing on economic subjects. It ends with the suggestion that, when historians of economic thought have believed it proper to try to take a trans-disciplinary look at the history of economic science, they have bought the history of science wholesale and drawn such comparisons as between Newtonian Astronomy and classical political economy. And yet – as Salim Rashid suggested – both political economy and geology ‘date their origins to about the same time; economics to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and geology to James Hutton’s paper before the Royal Society in 1785. Economists have generally ignored this period of interaction between economics and geology. It has been easy to move from Newton to Darwin without the earthly interlude’.