‘They have the strongest interest as capitalists in searching, deep into the foundations of economic science. They have the best kind of school the world can afford for such inquiries; a young community, […] it was as if political economy were being acted out on a stage - for in a colony we may witness the growth of human society, as plainly as we can observe the operation of bees through a glass hive’ (Lowe 1844).

In 1817 On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was first published. In the same year European settlement in Australia remained confined to a semicircular disk, centred on Sydney, with a radius of 50 km. But, only shortly before, the labyrinthine ranges that had for 30 years hemmed in the Sydney settlement were sufficiently traversed to make out the open tablelands that lay beyond, and which would revolutionise world's wool trade, and make Australia ‘rich and free’.

In anticipation of exploitation of the new Canaan's ‘boundless champaign’, Australia's first bank was formed in 1817. In the same year Governor Macquarie, perhaps stirred by the quickening of prospects, successfully proposed that New Holland be henceforth known as ‘Australia’. Thus, Ricardo's Principles appeared at a critical moment in Australia's economic history.

Ricardo's work offered food for thought for both the Colonial Office and colonists. Rent had nothing to do with land's productivity as such, and might be as free as air. And a ‘new society’, the Principles insinuates, would experience high average productivity of land and labour, scant rents and moderate wages, with the consequent high profits stimulating capital growth. Finally, the Principles contained a pregnant proposition, which would especially engage an essentially agricultural community: ‘A tax on rent would affect rent only; it would fall wholly on landlords, and could not be shifted to any class of consumers’ (I: 358).

The Colonial Office, further, had a particular cause to give notice to thoughts of about land or revenue in ‘new societies’; the cost of New South Wales (NSW) to the British government was in the post-Napoleonic period swelling alarmingly, from £583,000 in the 12 years before 1817, to £2,242,000 in the twelve beginning that year (Butlin et al. 1986: 37).

The Place of Ricardo's Economics in Marx's Theory

Marx had great respect for Ricardo, both regarding his analytic abilities and his intellectual integrity, and Ricardo's influence on Marx's economics was greater than that of any other individual economist. Nonetheless, it is also the case that Marx was severely critical of Ricardo's propositions on value and on growth, as well as those pertaining to the coordination of economic activities under capitalist relations of production and exchange. Moreover, the most impressive parts of Marx's economics lay in areas untouched by Ricardo, and all of Ricardo's economics were interpreted within Marx's own conceptual framework, which was very different from that of Ricardo's own classical liberalism. This conceptual framework is explained in Section 2, and Marx's treatment of Ricardo's economics is elucidated in Section 3. Section 4 follows with an outline of those parts of Marx's economics which owed no debt to Ricardo and which were analytically much stronger than those which did. They are thus relevant for the overall assessment of both Marx and Ricardo as economists. Finally, in Section 5, the claims that it is possible to resurrect a so-called classical-Marxian approach to economic theorization based on the work of Piero Sraffa is assessed as it clearly relates to understanding the intellectual relationship of Ricardo and Marx (Sraffa 1960).

The Principal Influences in the Formation of Marxism

Marx's thought has often been described as combining German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy (see, e.g., Lenin 1913). The latter included the work of Ricardo, but the first two intellectual influences had the more profound effects, and these significantly affected Marx's evaluation of British political economy, including Ricardo's ideas. They determined how Marx interpreted Ricardo's economics and how he transformed some of Ricardo's propositions to suit his own purposes. Moreover, they help explain why Marx's most important contributions to economic theory occurred independently of the influence of Ricardo as they follow from Marx's historical perspective and his analysis of the mechanisms of change that are indebted to the first two influences on his thought. By contrast, Ricardo saw all of history as more or less imperfectly capitalist3 and the other British economists that Marx studied were either similarly ahistorical or, like Adam Smith, anticipated strands of the historical materialism Marx developed from his understanding of German philosophy (see Meek 1977).

Let us go back to the beginnings of metaphysics, to the world of Greek philosophy. From 535 to 475 BC, Heraclitus of Ephesus was active in Ionian Asia Minor. He was one of the first thinkers to pose radical philosophical questions that point to the metaphysical reasons for being and war. Here, war and existence are brought into an equally primordial context – a thesis that has occupied thought in many variants right up to modern times.

If you look into the depths of European intellectual history, you realise what role war has played for the respective culture. For Heraclitus, the phenomenon of war was a manifestation of the ‘polemos’ at the roots of Western thought. Heraclitus traced its inexorability and called it the father of all things. In early Greek thought, war was not a phenomenon to be limited morally or politically. The moral grandeur that we ascribe to the condemnation of war today was absent in early ancient thought; at that time, it was more about the concern for an underlying cosmological harmony (Heraclitus, 2007).

A culture can only develop to its full potential when it takes a closer look at the dark source of energy. Accordingly, war reveals a higher power – a conception of war that modern thinking is alienated from. War would thus be the consummation of life itself, an expression of a deeply disturbing idea.

In European thought, as is well known, other ideas about war have developed. War is not a biological dynamic, but a phenomenon that must be controlled and contained. Even Plato, Cicero and Augustine were always concerned with the moment of limiting a war through divine instruction; they hoped for a deeper insight into the justice of a community.

As is well known, it took centuries to overcome bellicose thoughts. The furore of wars had devastated the world again and again; the claim to divine justice expressed in warlike conflict had scorched the earth and eroded human morality. This alienation that stemmed from war was to be overcome; total destruction was to be avoided and the moral claim to ultimate victory to be withdrawn. Only now, in the thinking of the early modern era in Grotius, Spinoza or in Kant, was war considered in terms of its legal foundation (Stadler, 2009).

Prelude

It was the summer of 1845, the weather not very different from the usual pattern of intermittent rain, sunshine and seasonal temperatures. Thoughts were turning naturally enough towards prospects for the harvest, the vital bounty of grain and potatoes that sustained the Irish people. The signs were good and expectations high after some poor harvests earlier in the decade. Beyond the horizon but unknown to the eight and a half million inhabitants of the island, invading forces, this time in the biosphere, were gathering strength. Two years earlier, a mysterious disease had ravaged potato crops in North America. From there, transatlantic traffic carried the disease to Europe. Geography was no barrier. By the early summer of 1845, the infection had reached Belgium and some other parts of continental Europe. With remarkable rapidity, the disease crossed the Channel. By August 1845, it was debilitating potato crops in the south of England. The following month, it had reached several parts of eastern Ireland. From Waterford and Wexford, there were alarming newspaper reports of a pestilence, as yet unnamed, attacking the potato fields. The nauseous stench of decay marked the progress of the disease. The leaves on potato stalks were turning black and the infection was spreading in all directions.

Introduction

The study of international relations has long focused on the strategic interactions of governments – games of war and treatises of peace. But increasingly in today’s globalised world, collective action crosses national boundaries and critical decisions that affect the world of politics fall to non-state actors, be they individuals, terrorist groups, grassroots movements or corporations. As Anne-Marie Slaughter describes in her apt analysis, practitioners and students of international affairs would benefit from seeing the world not as a chessboard of strategy games between statesmen, but as a web of networks, overlapping and intersecting worldwide and online (2017, 5–7). To understand action and reaction in the twenty-first century, one must now grapple with an entirely new space where neither state nor non-state actors exercise full control: the internet, whose infrastructure increasingly determines how information is consumed and decisions are made. This chapter discusses new challenges to the exercise of democracy and human rights in the international arena, brought on by the increasing ubiquity of online fora where modern public discourse takes place.

Freedom of expression is a key component of both democratic and human rights frameworks. Its regulation online has become subject of great discussion, both because of non-democratic regimes that seek to limit dissent and information online, and due to increasingly concerning disinformation and hate speech within social networks worldwide. Foundational to the liberal principle of free speech is the oft-invoked image of a ‘marketplace of ideas’. The concept dates back to nineteenth-century political philosophers like John Stuart Mill, who argued that in an unfettered space where the public could freely debate and weigh competing ideas without interference, rational human behaviour would allow the ‘best’ ideas to be chosen and exercised in society (see Mill, 1989, Part 2). Yet many scholars, including Mill himself, have discussed the imperfections of such an image, as the marketplace can be distorted by real-life conditions that create ‘market failures’, such as censorship, human bias towards the status quo and the historical evidence that the rationality of a human mind is not infallible (Ingber, 1984, 4–6). Distortions alter the ability of a rational individual to identify and act on an objectively best option or identify truth.

Among David Ricardo's theoretical developments, one is still accepted today, while also the subject of recurring discussions: his views on international trade. These views, however, are most of the time not reported in their complexity but reduced to what was called later the ‘principle of comparative advantage’, allegedly stated in a few paragraphs of the chapter ‘On foreign trade’ of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Taken out of the context of this chapter and of his other writings as well – and seemingly playing no role in the rest of the book – this ‘principle’ became the basis of international trade theories.

As will be seen, however, the so-called ‘principle of comparative advantage’ is a questionable interpretation of Ricardo's text. Ricardo's writings, admittedly, are sometimes ambiguous and he himself recognised this: ‘My speaking is like my writing too much compressed’, he wrote to Malthus (VI: 335). ‘I am too apt to crowd a great deal of difficult matter into so short a space as to be incomprehensible to the generality of readers’. Over the last few decades, however, his works have been the subject of more accurate readings, which show both that the traditional interpretation of this ‘principle’ is flawed and that a more faithful interpretation is possible. This chapter analyses the basic features of both interpretations, their main points of disagreement and their logical consequences. It will be seen that the alleged ‘principle’ is no principle at all: it cannot form the basis of any specific economic policy trying to influence the direction of trade, and the benefits a country receives from its participation in international exchanges are just the unintended consequences of the decisions of the many individuals who, in markets, only act for their own benefit.

Prelude. Ricardo's Text

In his chapter on foreign trade, Ricardo introduces an exchange between two countries, England and Portugal, each being able to produce two commodities: cloth and wine. The costs of production of these commodities are given in each country: Portugal requires 80 and 90 units of labour per year, respectively, to produce wine and cloth, while England requires 120 and 100 units of labour per year respectively.