The dawn of the 1820s in England marked a haunting departure from the sunlit optimism of Adam Smith. The world of the Wealth of Nations was being eclipsed by what would soon be known as the Dismal Science. In this era, Malthus and Ricardo... changed the viewpoint of their age from optimism to pessimism, replacing visions of progress with the cold calculus of scarcity and struggle.
The Ricardian Mechanism
Ricardo's gift to the world was plain. Here was a world stripped to its essentials and laid open for everyone to examine. He built a model of the capitalist economy that functioned like a relentless machine, governed by the laws of rent, taxation, and the unavoidable problem of population. However, this methodology—often called the Ricardian Vice (Theory)—involved creating highly abstract models that, while logically consistent, often ignored the messy, suffering reality of the human beings trapped within them.
Uncomplaining Steel vs. Laboring Hands
As the Napoleonic Wars subsided, England did not find peace, but a general depression. The industrial landscape was being terraformed by uncomplaining steel—machinery that produced tirelessly without the need for food or rest. The result was a brutal displacement of laboring hands. Workers were no longer partners in production but casualties of it.
- 1779: A precursor of the storm, when a mob of eight thousand workers attacked a mill and burned it to the ground.
- 1811: The Luddite protests against technology swept through England as workers sought to break the frames that broke their lives.
- 1816-1820: Business was very bad; the dreaded theory of general gluts (overproduction) became a reality, and 'bread and blood' riots broke out across the nation.
While Ricardo calculated rent, William Cobbett agitated the masses. He saw that the abstract "economic policy" of the elites was creating a landscape where the poor were viewed merely as variables in a Malthusian equation, leading to the radicalization of the English working class.