Law on Trial 2025: Critical Readings
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
As part of Law on Trial 2025 we are launching a new series: Critical Readings.
This open-ended series is intended to provide an opportunity for convivial reveries on the labour of working with texts and ideas. Broadly orientated on the humanities, the critique of political economy and critical theory, each meeting will provide a chance to read as much or as little as you have time to and to spectate or take part in discussion and digression. Whilst there will be no fixed format for the meetings, it is envisaged that there will be a convenor who will provide a text(s), a guiding question or questions and some wrangling of discussion. Suggestions for reading/ listening are set out below.
The inaugural session will be lead by Professor Neil Ravenscroft, who is a visiting professor in the school of law. Professor Ravenscroft will focus on David Ricardo: very much a thinker for our times.
Professor Neil Ravenscroft was a Professor at the International Agriculture University. He specialises in people-environment relationships associated with farming, forestry and water resources.
After decades of increasing scrutiny and critique, David Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage has been brought back into the spotlight by the Trump Administration’s recent imposition of tariffs on international trade with the USA. While undoubtedly useful for developing an anti-tariff narrative, it is clear that few commentators have a full grasp of Ricardo’s arguments, nor the ‘foundational principles’ upon which he based his thinking of political economy. It is thus a good time to reflect on Ricardo’s work and its continued relevance to the contemporary world of economics and trade.
David Ricardo, born into the Portuguese Jewish community in London, made a fortune on the Stock Exchange, trading Government bonds during the Napoleonic Wars. He subsequently moved to the country, bought himself a seat in Parliament and, influenced by the work of Adam Smith, starting writing pamphlets on political economy, in the process beginning to systematise the core tenets of classical economic theory. He was persuaded by James Mill to expand these writings into a general treatise, which he published in 1817 as The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
Focussing on the relationship between land, labour and capital, Ricardo set out the seven foundational principles (or laws) of classical economics:
1. The cost of producing a good determines its price.
2. The amount of labour – and to some extent the cost of production - required to produce a good determines its value.
3. Rent is the difference in price between the most and least productive acres – generating permanent conflict between landowners and capitalists.
4. The supply of money for wages is determined by the amount of capital in circulation: as capital increases, population grows, more land is rented, capital profits shrink, and wages are lowered.
5. When wages fall below a minimum for survival, population drops as a result of war, pestilence, and disease.
6. Diminishing returns set in when capitalists must spend more on subsistence wages and therefore have less to invest and expand production.
7. The quantity theory of money indicates that rising prices result from an increased supply of gold, through domestic or foreign trade.
Ricardo used these principles to develop arguments about the advantages of free trade among nations. Driven by his conviction that the Corn Laws benefitted few beyond the wealthy landowning classes, his law of comparative advantage sought to demonstrate that unfettered international trade could benefit all participating nations, regardless of their relative wealth. In essence, Ricardo argued that as each nation found its own productive specialization, it could concentrate on this specialization, exchanging its special commodity with other nations for goods that it could not produce for itself at an advantageous price.
Although his ideas have been challenged and, in some cases, superseded by new theoretical approaches to economics, there is no doubt that Ricardo systematized classical economics to such an extent that his work remains relevant to much contemporary economic debate.
References
Ricardo, D. (1817) The principles of political economy and taxation. Multiple editions and publishers since this time. See, for example, the 1973 edition published by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, which is a reprint of Ricardo’s third Edition, published in 1821. See, in particular, chapter 2 on rent and chapter 7 on international trade.
Also of interest: BBC In Our Time: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss David Ricardo's argument that Britain's economy was being held back by the interests of landlords and protectionism, and his call for free trade. Last aired 25/03/21 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tfjk
Upcoming Critical Readings Sessions will include
Adam Gearey and Piyel Haldar on absurdism and the science of impossible objects
Joe Brooker on Frederick Jameson
Damian Catani on Franz Fanon
Akane Kawakami on Michael Ferrier
Contact name: Adam Gearey
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