10.4324 9780203085677-2 Chapterpdf

1
Ricardo’s architectonic
Subjectivity and the hierarchy of
knowledge
Had this profound work really been written in England during the nineteenth
century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could
it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mer-
cantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities in Europe,
and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair’s breadth? All
other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and
documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, a priori, from the understanding itself,
laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had
constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science
of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Most of the numerous studies on Ricardo’s work attempt to either establish or dis-
count the truth-value of Ricardo’s political economy in the economic world of
today. Many scholars have attempted to abandon or discredit Ricardo’s seminal
ideas on the labour theory of value in order to use him as a proponent of price-
driven neoclassical economics,1 or to refute his work on the basis of the internal
logic of his text insofar as it does (or more often does not) correspond with the
empirical reality of price formation in present day markets. Others have attempted
to resuscitate Ricardo’s work more fully in the twentieth century with his labour
theory of value intact,2 working within the language and concepts of his texts, or
have even gone so far as to attempt to solve his most difficult problem, that of the
invariable standard of value.3 And of course we cannot discount either the great
influence that Ricardo held over Marx’s imagination,4 or subsequent Marxist
scholars dealing explicitly with the history of economic thought and the labour
theory of value in particular.5 My goal is not, despite the rich literature and vast
tradition of scholarship, to add yet another layer in the palimpsest of this tradi-
tional historical inquiry, nor is it to reclaim any fundamental truth in Ricardo’s
work that has been lost in the various developments of the field. Instead, I would
like to locate Ricardo’s work within the history of the modern liberal subject,
within the history of what we now call homo oeconomicus.
Ricardo is a necessary starting point in this history as it is in his architectonic,
in his construction of a coherent and rational system that gives parameters to
12 Ricardo’s architectonic
economic life, that we see the first genuine containment of economic rationality.
In fact it is my contention that Ricardo’s architectonic6 is indeed the first verit
able economic architectonic at all, outdoing Smith’s Wealth of Nations in the
coherence of both its form and content. Capitalism thus takes on a character that
was not present in theory before Ricardo. The economy now has its own types of
subjectivity, its own temporality and its own distinct role for the political econo-
mist. This is the core of the problematic that stems from the cusp of the classical
era – how it is that subjects both know and act within the time of capitalism,
within the parameters of economic architectonics as set out by the (political)
economists of disparate schools of thought. Thus we will see that the complex
relationship between subjectivity, temporality and the political economist will
come to be most poignantly understood through an inquiry into the nature of epi-
stemology, economic epistemology, as it is carried on, manipulated and altered
from its initial state in its first veritable house, from Ricardo’s Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation.
Nonetheless, we cannot begin such an inquiry into the subjective legacy of
the Principles without first examining the theoretical complexity with which
Ricardo’s architectonic is so very carefully constructed. In so proceeding we will
encounter, after a consideration of his philosophical method, three distinct eco-
nomic subjectivities. The first, the ground of this edifice, is the labouring subject,
the subject who creates all value yet holds no epistemological claim within the
economy. This subject is a subsisting body, and a body who is forgotten in its
very subsistence. The second subject is the political economist himself, and we
will witness the strokes which this most privileged subject (i.e. Ricardo) uses to
distinguish between not only intellectual and manual labour, but the manual sub-
jectivity of the labourer and the intellectual subjectivity of the mover of capital.
Our third subject therefore is the capitalist, and by way of Ricardo’s work on
taxation, we will see how homo oeconomicus emerges in tandem with the logic
and movement of capital. Ironically, this third subject is born within the confines
of the naturalized laws of distribution that the political economist himself has
prescribed. But, before we can explore any of these three economic subjects we
must examine the rational and naturalized premise upon which Ricardo’s eco-
nomic architectonic is built, an architectonic from which all three subjectivities
are born.
Prefacing political economy: the rationalization of the

natural
In the Preface to Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation we
first encounter the material ground upon which a careful and abstract political
economy of distribution will be constructed. For some his architectonic is
faulty, not conforming to the scientific principles with which the economy is
best understood. But for us his architectonic will not be questioned along the
lines of scientific logic, but rather through an examination of the epistemologi-
cal and ontological potential (and limitation) that it holds. Theodor Adorno
Ricardo’s architectonic 13
once wrote that in both art and theory ‘the successful work . . . is not one which
resolves objective contradiction in a spurious harmony, but one which
expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions,
pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure’ (1981, 32). The spurious
harmony between the rationalization of economic laws, in particular the laws
of distribution, and the natural realm of human existence, is the central ques-
tion of the Principles. Yet pure and uncompromised contradictions are woven
into the very fabric of Ricardo’s architectonic. Our task, for the moment, is to
see if these bold contradictions are but a part of our broader understanding of
the structure of the spurious harmony. And, as this is in fact the case, how
these contradictions end up betraying Ricardo’s very method, intentions and
goals.
Like Adam Smith, Ricardo finds it necessary to partition the produce of the
land in terms of the classes that produce it, in terms of the specialization of
labour. In a broad historical gesture, he tells us that:
in different stages of society, the proportion of the whole produce of the

earth will be allotted to each of these classes [proprietors of the land, owners
of stock and capital, and labourers], under the names of rent, profit and
wages will be essentially different; depending mainly on the actual fertility
of the soil, on the accumulation of capital and population, and on the skill,
ingenuity and instruments employed in agriculture.
(5)
While we might point out that Ricardo attempts to create unity between the three
classes by implicating them in a coherent system of ratios, it is more important
to focus on the profound dichotomy created between the natural and the rational.
In order to ascertain the ratios of profit allocation he asks us to focus on three
factors. First, we have the natural and material circumstances of the economy.
In other words, we are concerned with the soil, its fertility or usefulness, its
quality for our productive purposes. In this sense the ground on which the archi-
tectonic of the economy is laid is quite plain; it is the soil from which natural
wealth might rise. But to say that this first qualification is but a material moment
would be to forget that the soil, in economic terms, is always mediated by our
understanding and measurement of its usefulness for the purposes of production.
The soil is never left to exist in and of itself, it is recuperated through the
acknowledgement of human need and human production.7
Second, Ricardo asks us to assess the combination, the commingling, of
rationality and natural law. Rationality is crucial to Ricardo’s political economy
insofar as the accumulation of capital can only be accomplished by rational cap
italist agents, or those with the power to decide when and how production should
be undertaken. Natural law, on the other hand, is key insofar as Ricardo relies
upon his own modification of Malthus’ theory of population. Although his
reconciliation with Malthus’ theory of population occurs most clearly in his dis-
cussion of wages, the principle of the natural struggle for existence that Malthus
posits so forcefully is essential to Ricardo’s understanding of the nature of popu-
lation growth.
The ‘struggle for existence’ is based on a rather simple mathematical formula.
Malthus claims that given the premises that humans need food and that the
attraction between the sexes will always be strong, the two most important
factors in the regulation of society are population and sustenance. Population, he
argues, grows in a geometric (or exponential) ratio, while the means of subsist-
ence can only grow in an arithmetic ratio. At regular intervals, the population
will be naturally regulated by starvation and disease, by misery and vice.8 The
particulars of this theory show the complexity of population cycles, but in
general Malthus’ view that the working or lower classes are incapable of moral
restraint (or not easily subjected to social planning) leads him to conclude that
there is no measure with which to control the population save by the force of
nature. In this way he is able to eschew the possibility of the conscious ‘perfecti-
bility’ of mankind:
This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in

the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their
effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in
the way to the perfectibility of society.
(1999, 14)
Misery and vice, the two natural checks on the population, serve more the
improvement of the condition of the few, than poor laws or state provisions
might ever do for the improvement of the masses. In fact, monetary assistance to
the poor only intensifies the eventual misery of the working class by providing
the economic comfort from which they might consider having larger families,
resulting, ultimately, in an unusual and artificially sustained growth in popula-
tion. Starvation, rather than mere misery, is then the only natural remedy to this
exacerbated problem.
While Ricardo would agree with the principle of population growth, as well
as with Malthus’ distaste for the Poor Laws, he does manage to take what is a
genuinely ahistorical position on Malthus’ part, and contextualize it within the
broader social and political circumstance. So while population does grow in geo-
metric fashion at the same time as resources can only be produced in arithmetic
ratio, Ricardo believes that the poor would be able to control their ‘natural’
desire to reproduce and plan their existence socially if they were adequately edu-
cated. The impulses and premises that Malthus describes are then taken to be
true in an ahistorical sense, but the potential of the working class is understood
within a historically specific political and intellectual climate. In part we might
ascribe Ricardo’s modification of Malthusian thought to the influence of James
Mill and his pedagogical strategy.9 We will also see, however, that Ricardo’s
faith in intellectual labour, in the intellectual capacities of economic agents, is of
foundational importance. In much the same way as ‘natural’ and disastrous
population growth can be vitiated by rational social planning and the education
of the masses in the rational underpinnings of everyday life, population growth
is also put in check by the rational planning of the economy, in the service of the
accumulation of capital. Ricardo thus historicizes that which Malthus deemed to
be inexorably natural. Based on the potential for economic progress within a
rational political context, Ricardo is able to optimistically project progressive
social outcomes from the commingling of the rational and the natural. It is this
optimism that frames the very spirit of his architectonic.
Finally, the third factor in the ratio of profit allocation between the classes is
the rational manipulation of the natural world. What Ricardo terms ‘the skill,
ingenuity and instruments employed in agriculture’ (5) are in fact the conglom-
erate of human technological advancement in the face of natural barriers to the
fertility of the soil and agricultural growth. Whereas the combination of rational
and natural forces is bound in the growth of the population, rational control over
the natural world manifests itself in the process of agricultural production. It also
extends to industrial production, though this is not mentioned in Ricardo’s
preface. In part this is because he seeks a natural ground for his theory of distri-
bution, a premise which enables the creation of a natural law of the economy. In
part it is also because industrial production already presupposes a successful
agricultural economy, already demands a technologically advanced system of
food and clothing production. Social reproduction must be efficient (i.e. a maxi-
mization of production through rationally advanced technological means) before
the industrial economy can expand and flourish. Ricardo moves away from the
physiocratic notion that the physiology of the agricultural economy is the source
of all net value, and instead posits this physiology as the basis for industrial
development. Where the Physiocrats stop at reproduction in the agricultural
realm with the understanding that the natural world is the source of all wealth,
Ricardo sees the tools created by the rational and technologically specialized
thinking subject as liberators of the economy. In other words, Ricardo uses the
natural premise of wealth from the soil as just that, a premise. Technological
development and rational manipulation can create far greater wealth through
industrial production so long as the natural world is first exploited in the most
efficient way.
With these three factors, these negotiations between the rational and the
natural in the ratio of profit allocation, Ricardo finds himself in need of a set of
laws of distribution to fill out the first veritable architectonic of political
economy. Because he understands human rational control over the material
world to be progressing historically, a rational account of the natural motion of
capital is necessary. As we will later see, rent, profit and wages will be combined
in an organic unity, and will follow what he claims to be a natural course.
Value and method

There has been considerable debate over the nature of Ricardo’s economic
method, yet the economic philosophy that underpins this method remains
remarkably untouched. While Marx’s commentary on Ricardo’s work is rooted
in the rubric of scientific necessity, he does begin, in the second volume of Theo-
ries of Surplus Value, to point to the fundamental philosophical problem of the
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation:
Ricardo’s method is as follows: He begins with the determination of the

magnitude of the value of the commodity by labour-time and then examines
whether the other economic relations and categories contradict this determi-
nation of value or to what extent they modify it. The historical justification
of this method of procedure, its scientific necessity in the history of eco-
nomics, are evident at first sight, but so is, at the same time, its scientific
inadequacy. This inadequacy not only shows itself in the method of presen-
tation (in a formal sense) but leads to erroneous results because it omits
some essential links and directly seeks to prove the congruity of economic
categories with one another.
(1968, 164–5, original emphasis)
The embodiment of labour, as Ricardo establishes in his labour theory of value,

gives the Principles scientific validity for Marx because he does not engage in
the same ungrounded theorization of wages and price as the political economists
who preceded him. But this embodied starting point remains just that as suppos-
edly natural laws are manipulated into coherence, forced into organic unity. The
productive or labouring human body thus serves as the object from which an
artificial and at times coercive construction of economic laws might grow.
Instead of locating contradiction within the laws themselves and between the
formal laws of economics as rationalized and the actual material circumstances
of the economy, Ricardo seeks to eradicate contradiction, to have the natural
flow of the economy mirror the rational ‘flow’ of logic.10
Although evidence of this method is contained within Ricardo’s economic
texts, much of the impetus to resolve these contradictions, I believe, comes from
James Mill’s counsel throughout their early correspondence. Before writing his
Principles Ricardo expressed to Mill a reluctance to write, a deep insecurity in
his ability to convey his subject matter coherently and intelligently. Mill, with
his admiration for Ricardo’s economic thought and financial savvy, offered his
services as a mentor, a teacher of writing and proper logic. Even though we
cannot discern now to what extent Ricardo followed Mill’s advice, at least not
intentionally, we can see evidence of Mill’s analytical influence in Ricardo’s
work. Mill not only read the various drafts of the Principles, but also encouraged
changes in its organization and structure. The modifications in Ricardo’s sub-
sequent editions of the Principles often correspond with Mill’s suggestions, and
Ricardo’s deepest concerns about his own rational coherence were often voiced
back to Mill, who responded invariably with the tenets of formal logic – albeit in
extremely simplified form. In part Mill’s approach is founded upon utilitarian
rationality, where the validity of any claim is proven by its ordering, by its posi-
tion in the chain of reasoning that leads to the most progressive conclusion. In a
letter to Ricardo from September 23, 1818 he gives advice as to how to write
economic papers in the general interest of the ‘progress of the human mind’
(1962, 301):
Let those discourses, therefore, which we have so often talked about, be

written without delay. And do not stay, in the first instance, to be very nice
and punctilious about any thing; run the matter off while the vein is open. I
would, if I were you, set down in the first place, on separate piece of paper,
in a distinct proposition or propositions, the subject which I meant to handle,
and then under it I would state the different points which I meant to take up,
as well as my own propositions as the answers to them. I would pass and re-
pass these in my mind; to see as far as I could recollect, if they contained
every thing, and if I had them in the best possible order; that is, the order in
which that is taken first which needs nothing of what follows to explain it,
and which serves to explain what follows; that is taken second which is
explained by what precedes, and is serviceable for explaining what follows,
without needing what follows for explaining itself. This is the plain rule of
utility, which will always guide you right, and in which there is no mystery.
(ibid., emphasis added)
The plain rule of utility follows a simple causal logic, a logic which successfully
instrumentalizes economic laws into manageable formulae. Mill’s advice comes
after Ricardo’s Principles was first published, and represents, perhaps, a hopeful
exaggeration of the method employed in Ricardo’s work.
In earlier correspondence Mill had emphasized the necessity of simplicity and
warned against open texts which leave the reader to infer proofs and correct con-
clusions.11 This advice addresses the failure of Ricardo’s work to adhere to this
positivist standpoint. His later fixation on an invariant measure, an absolute
standard of value, reveals one of the most obvious faults in his system, and has
provided the ammunition with which neoclassical economists12 have attempted
to destroy the theoretical premises, including the labour theory of value, of
Ricardo’s work. Nevertheless, a complete system of ideas, a coherent explana-
tion of economic laws, was one of Ricardo’s foremost concerns in the writing of
his Principles. Mill encouraged Ricardo in October of 1816 to revise his text in
order to create such a system:
In the mean time, however, it is your business, to work as hard as you can;
till you have completely accomplished what you tell me in your letter is
your first object – namely, to get down upon paper a complete system of
ideas upon the subject. That is right. This is exactly the proper mode of
proceeding.
(1962, 86)
In part this desire for a total system stems from the lack thereof, from what
Marx describes as a movement of ‘great naïveté in a perpetual contradiction’
(1968, 165) in Adam Smith’s work. Marx believes that Smith was engaged in
two simultaneous and independent lines of inquiry, so independent that when
they were presented together in The Wealth of Nations they formed a muddied
contradiction:
on the one hand he attempted to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois

society but on the other, he partly tried to describe its externally apparent
forms of life for the first time, to show its relations as they appear outwardly
and partly he had even to find a nomenclature and corresponding mental
concepts for these phenomena.
(Ibid.)
We can clearly see that Smith was not attempting to construct a coherent eco-
nomic unity in his Wealth of Nations. But the interesting aspect of this critique is
the revelation of what Marx deems to be a progressive move forward in science
– the very creation of an economic architectonic. And as with any architectonic,
there must be a firm ground or starting point upon which to build a system of
coherent laws:
But at last Ricardo steps in and calls to science: Halt! The basis, the starting
point for the physiology of the bourgeois system – for the understanding of
its internal organic coherence and life process – is the determination of
value by labour time. Ricardo starts with this and forces science to get out
of the rut, to render an account of the extent to which the other categories –
the relation of production and commerce – evolved and described by it, cor-
respond or contradict this basis, this starting point; to elucidate how for a
science which in fact reflects and reproduces the manifest forms of the
process, and therefore also how for these manifestations themselves, corres-
pond to the basis on which the inner coherence, the actual physiology of
bourgeois society rests on the basis which forms its starting point; and in
general, to examine how matters stand with the contradiction between the
apparent and the actual movement of the system. This is Ricardo’s great his-
torical significance for science.
(166)
Within this physiology fuelled by labour time we see emerge the basis for
Marx’s examination of the relations between the classes in the economy. For
although Ricardo never explicitly describes or refers to class conflict as the
historical engine behind economic relations, he does portray two very distinct
classes standing in opposition to one another insofar as the one, the labouring
class, must be the premise of the architectonic, and the other, the capitalist
class, must move according to the rhythms of capitalist physiology. Thus
Ricardo gives us a picture of the dynamics of class relations in his architec-
tonic, but does not develop it through determinate abstraction.13 In this sense
Ricardo, though innovative, was unable to genuinely connect economic law to
social relations.
While Marx establishes his admiration and respect for Ricardo’s contribution
to the scientific study of economics, he nonetheless sees a fault in Ricardo’s
method. This fault manifests itself in the structure of Ricardo’s ‘faulty architec-
tonic’. He explains that the entire basis and structure of Ricardo’s architectonic
finds itself in the first six chapters of the Principles as these deal with value and
the naturalized laws of distribution that apply thereto. And it is within the first
two chapters that
the developed categories of political economy, are confronted with their

principle – the determination of value – and examined in order to determine
the degree to which they directly correspond to this principle and the posi-
tion regarding the apparent discrepancies which they introduce into the
value relations of commodities.
(Ibid.)
While this strikes me as being apt because Marx is eager to grasp that which is
new in the understanding of the configuration of economic categories and the
laws of distribution, which is scientifically grounded within the relations and cat-
egories of bourgeois production, there emerges another startling contribution in
Ricardo’s work that does not correspond with what Marx might term ‘scientific
necessity’. The categories and relations of bourgeois production can never be
complete, in my opinion, without a consideration of the subjects who constitute,
and are constituted by, them. Although the admitted deficiency in Ricardo’s text
is the lack of any specific theory of class struggle or theory of social relations
with respect to economic laws, he does paint differentiated economic subjects
with distinct epistemological brushes in order to obscure the promise of equality
and cooperation that would demand a material class struggle. And so I argue that
Ricardo’s architectonic extends to include the entire text insofar as we are able
to glean the relationship that each of Ricardo’s subjects has to knowledge and
the economy through not only his discussion on value, but also his comments on
rent, machinery, wages and taxation.
In Marx’s view there is no contribution that exists outside the first two chap-
ters, because any further commentary of Ricardo’s
where it does not consist of monotonous formal application of the same

principles to various extraneous matters, or of polemical vindication of these
principles, there is only repetition or amplification; at most one can occa-
sionally find a striking chain of reasoning in the final sections.
(Ibid.)
But it is not merely the development of new principles that constitutes a contri-
bution to economic or philosophical thought. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
for instance, we might claim that his contribution to philosophical reasoning is
contained within the Transcendental Analytic alone, but then come to realize that
it is actually extended in the Paralogisms and Antimonies by way of the errors
that the subject unavoidably encounters. Similarly, in Ricardo’s Principles the
latter part of the work (inadvertently) shows the flaws in the make-up of eco-
nomic knowledge for economic subjects and the human community. So while
we will witness the many deficiencies that Marx points out in Ricardo’s method
itself, these deficiencies are often instructive. In fact, they have long since
plagued the field of political economy, which has continued to adhere to Ricar-
do’s epistemological hierarchy14 at the expense of the analysis of real economic
continuity. This is quite important, crucial even, if we are to attempt to under-
stand that which ails the economic reasoning that follows Ricardo. In Ricardo’s
method we discover more than laws of economic movement in their various
dimensions and elaborations. We discover subjects that give birth to the rational
economic men that underlie economic reasoning today. I shall return, therefore,
to Ricardo’s text in order to give an account of the nature and subjects of his
architectonic.
Ricardo’s principles: the embodied ground of the

intellectualized economy
In Ricardo’s work we see for the first time in Western economic thought a
radical interrelationship between labour and value, between the time of people’s
toil and the exchangeable value of commodities. Unlike Adam Smith, who saw
labour as one of many factors in the determination of value, Ricardo understands
labour as the source of all value, as the embodied premise of value in the pro-
ductive and distributive aspects of the economy. What was once but a moment in
a linear causality of price determination has become, in Ricardo’s work on value,
both a finite point of original creation, and, at the same time, an ongoing and
naturalized element in the economic system. Through a conceptual shift that rec-
ognizes the potential of human labour, that moves towards the embodiment of
the creation of value, Ricardo is able to dissociate the price of labour from the
determination of commodity price, to sever the source of value from its broader
consequences as determined by price alone. What this ostensibly means, is that
while labour was, in classical economic thought, considered to be a variable in
the puzzle of value, it has now become value’s source, its home, its body. Of
course this value means nothing if it is not recuperated into a system of alloca-
tion and exchange, into an economic structure that moves in predictable and
quantifiable rhythms. So while labour always stands strong as the starting point
of value in the economy, it must be thought out through the means of produc-
tion, exchange and broad-scale distribution. The embodied premise, the worker,
forms the ground of what we will come to see is an intellectualized economy, a
disembodied territory for the accumulation of capital.
We must recognize from the outset of Ricardo’s architectonic that the subject
who experiences labour in the way that Ricardo describes, is first and foremost a
body who produces, a body who holds firm the ground of production. This
labouring subject is not a thinking subject, however; he is instead a subsisting
subject with needs and wants who requires a certain number of commodities in
exchange for his labour, in order to survive. Certainly Malthus’ theory of popula-
tion contributed to Ricardo’s view of the body that produces and subsists, but
because Ricardo’s view of the social is also a historical view, because his under-
standing of population growth is mediated by the social climate of any particular
era, he also locates this subject who labours within history, within a certain time.
A paradoxical situation arises where the human being, as a body that works,
moves and creates in time, is both frozen within history as the abstract homo
oeconomicus and, at the same time, is thrown into perpetual motion along with
the circulation and distribution of capital. While the worker is both painfully
material and terrifyingly abstract, we can see that he is also set in motion as a
physical instrument of the workings of the economy. The body that produces
value must be intellectualized, by economists of course, in order to give us the
principles that explain, predict and ultimately dictate the natural movement of
capitalist economies. If we move through these principles systematically, which
given James Mill’s methodological recommendations we must, we will see how
the physically labouring body finds its double in the intellectual labour of the
individual who moves money capital and who pays taxes, and discovers its master
in the intellectual labour of the political economist, lawmaker and philosopher.
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation is in its first six chapters
a series of general economic principles, rules that are a naturalized account of
the rational machinations of the economy. The very first principle, upon which
everything must ostensibly hinge, is as follows:
The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for

which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is
necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation
which is paid for the labour.
(11)
This principle exists as a rebuttal to Smith’s understanding of the relationship

between wages and the exchange value of goods.15 Ricardo, as we have seen, did
not believe that wages would necessarily affect the price of goods because a
certain level of subsistence was absolutely necessary to maintain the workers.
More importantly, this principle places commodities as understood through their
exchange value – goods ready for exchange – within the tension between labour-
ers and scarcity, within, at bottom, the ‘natural’ arena of the economy.
Scarcity, however, does not only imply goods which are scarcely available,
but goods which are unique, particular to a given region or quality of soil, or
goods that are of value due to their collectability and prestigious social signifi-
cance. While these goods are originally given their value by the labour required
to produce or extract them, they cannot be modified, if extant, by additional
labour. Their scarcity alone becomes the precondition of their value, even if the
toil of men lingers in their past. In this way we might understand why rare paint-
ings, speciality wines, and things of which there are few to be found in nature
might hold a much greater exchange value than commodities that require more
labour time to be produced. The point remains, however, that scarcity is at the
opposite pole of labour in the determination of value and, as this opposite pole,
alludes to a different system of valuation. The value of scarce goods is not
created by labour, but resides within the objects themselves insofar as they
signify their own scarcity, their own unique and desirable qualities. The quantifi-
cation of the value of these objects through price relies upon socially determined
notions of rarity and worth. While Ricardo devotes little time to the discussion
of scarcity (not even a full paragraph) it frames his discussion of labour as the
source of value by giving it an inanimate other, a socially constructed source of
value that is still grounded in an abstract schema of quantification.
I would argue that this truly marginal form of scarcity is not the only scarcity
to be found in Ricardo’s work, and is most certainly not the most important type
of scarcity that confronts labour as the source of value. Because human beings
have needs and desires, the scarcity of commodities necessary for subsistence
comes to the fore. Ricardo looks at this form of scarcity as part of the determina-
tion of wages, for wages must compensate workers sufficiently in order to
provide for their survival. So the scarcity of commodities necessary for survival
dictates the price that they hold on the market, and these prices determine the
wages of the workers. Again scarcity and labour stand at two poles; this time not
in a primarily conceptual relationship that shows us the nature of the sources of
value, but in a material reality that juxtaposes the worker with his own survival,
with, in the ultimate instance, his own death.
Another paradoxical situation takes place in the relationship between the
worker and scarcity. On the one hand, labour cannot affect the value of scarce
goods, nor can scarce goods affect the value of labour. On the other hand, labour
is absolutely contingent upon scarcity insofar as scarcity not only applies to
goods that cannot be produced in abundance (such as particular pieces of art,
etc.), but also to goods that are in short supply and absolutely necessary to the
survival of the labourer. In the first instance we have a conceptual distinction
that denies a relationship between scarcity and labour apart from the fact that
they both hold sway, separately of course, as sources of value. And in the second
instance we have a material situation that forces labour and scarcity into contact
because of the need to survive, the need to reproduce oneself. Ultimately the
labourer is held to a position of abstract economic impotence in the face of scar-
city when we consider the first distinction, and to a position of real material
impotence, death even, when in the face of the second distinction. Scarcity can
have no effect on the worker’s role in the creation of value, but necessarily binds
him to the greater production of commodities necessary for survival. The direct
bind between the worker and scarcity demands that men toil, that they commit
their time to the production and distribution of goods. Work and death are tied
from the start inside of the bodies of Ricardo’s economic agents, at least insofar
as we understand these rather impotent agents to be workers, to be creating value
through the commitment of their labour.
Michel Foucault’s discussion of the epistemological shift that occurs in Ricar-
do’s work on value is quite important at this juncture. He argues that the cusp of
the classical era of economic thought is marked by a shift in the understanding
of labour from, on the one hand, the activity of people who interact within a
system of economic signs, to the understanding of labour as something that pro-
duces value. So value, instead of being a determinate factor in a system of
exchange, or something to be found in the earth or soil, becomes a product, a
material reality within production. In The Order of Things he explains that:
Value can no longer be defined, as in the classical age, on the basis of a total
system of equivalences, and of the capacity that commodities have of repre-
senting one another. Value has ceased to be a sign, it has become a product.
If things are worth as much as the labour devoted to them, or if their value is
at least proportionate to that labour it is not that labour is a fixed and con-
stant value exchangeable as such in all places and at all times, it is because
any value, whatever it may be, has its origin in labour.
(277)
Not only does this indicate a shift in the representation of labour in intellectual
terms, it also reflects a shift in the ontological status of the worker. The vacilla-
tion that occurs between the production of value inherent to labour and the scar-
city that threatens the worker with death, ultimately affects the real worker with
a new knowledge, an embodied and particular physical reality. Through Ricardo
Foucault sees that ‘thrust back by poverty to the very brink of death, a whole
class of men experience, nakedly, as it were, what need, hunger and labour are’
(284). But this new knowledge gained by those who labour is not the knowledge
that really explains the mechanisms of the economy in any way congruent with
Ricardo’s principles. In fact, this new knowledge exists outside of his economic
system, even though embodiment stands at the base of the principles. The princi-
ples will follow, as we will see, along a rational path. Labour forms the basis of
the structure of production and distribution, but the toil itself, the experience of
labour, does not inform the way in which the economy operates nor the way in
which the economic realm is formally constructed. So while Foucault allows us
to understand, through his archaeology, what it is that happens to those who toil,
he only begins to hint at the disjuncture between the material reality of this situ-
ation and the immateriality at the heart of Ricardo’s work. This immateriality
can only be understood if we return to the technical yet foundational economic
questions of his principles in order to untangle the implication of each moment
of economic truth held tenuously in a supposedly integrated and total system of
economic logic.
To return to the first principle of political economy, to the embodied first
premise that holds labour to be the source of value,16 we must question what the
knowledge of this original source affords us in terms of economic reasoning.
Ricardo gives labour both a privileged and limited position in his principles by
endowing it with a mystical character, while at the same time subjecting it to
radical forms of material and social contingency. It may be for Ricardo the
unquestionable source of value, but in and of itself it cannot help us understand
the way in which we might measure the relative prices of commodities on the
market. As the source of value labour is of utmost importance and could never
really be forgotten, not even in the complex ratios of his schema of distribution.
But the source of value is not the same as what Ricardo terms an invariable
standard of value, or the yardstick by which all other relative values might be
measured. The invariable standard, as I will discuss later when I address its own
principle, is an elusive spectre that inhabits much of Ricardo’s work. It repre-
sents the direct link (and ultimately the confusion) between value and price that
was so crucial to his discussion of distribution. We see in the progressive edi-
tions of the Principles that he comes to understand the invariable standard as
more and more of an impossibility, even though it remains the necessary myth
that sustains the whole of the economic model.
Labour as a source of value and labour as a measure of value are two abso-
lutely separate questions. On the one hand we must accept labour to be a source
of value as a first principle, while at the same time we must reduce this source to
a fact that lends little or no insight into the matter of value as such. The invari
able standard can only be found in a commodity whose value was never altered
by labour or by scarcity and is the only commodity that might shed light on the
quantitative nature of value. By Ricardo’s own admission in his later writings,
this untouched commodity is an impossibility in terms. So the original source of
value, labour, is never present and unwavering in its own quantification because
labour is a living source of value whose existence depends upon the supply of
other commodities. I have already argued that the worker is confronted from the
start with death, with his own precarious situation in the face of scarce yet neces-
sary goods. But the economy, insofar as it is imagined through Ricardo’s princi-
ples, is confronted from its first premise with life, with the contingencies and
nuances of a community of living beings. For this reason the first premise of the
economy is the premise that both holds and threatens to destroy the correct (i.e.
rational and natural) movement of production and distribution. While this con-
frontation is by no means ever made explicit, or even acknowledged by Ricardo,
it makes itself apparent throughout his work whenever the nature of the suste-
nance of labour, i.e. the question of wages, comes into play. In part we might see
how the problem of life disappears when subsumed under Malthus’ theory of
population, when subsumed under the supposedly natural ratios of population
growth and resource production. But this growth is never just natural, and the
production of goods, Ricardo would admit, is always undertaken by rational
human agents, at least if we consider those who control the durable capital that
allows production to occur in the first place.
While the labourer faces death in relation to his own survival, the economy
faces the life of the worker when confronted with its own survival. But life is not
a dynamic or phenomenological category; it is conceptually transformed into the
means of subsistence, it becomes the reified consideration of the maintenance of
workers as instruments of the economy. Ricardo’s belief that the wages of labour
are directly affected by the price of commodities necessary to survival is the pre-
cursor to Marx’s discussion of the reproduction of labour in Volume One of
Capital. There we see the development of what remains a matter of the determi-
nation of profit in Ricardo’s work (i.e. wages have a direct effect on the rate of
profit), into a consideration for the reproduction of the social whole, for the
reproduction of labour power. Here, however, we see a concern for the actual
purchasing power of wages as opposed to the relative price of wages. For this
reason food plays an important role in Ricardo’s economic principles. In particu-
lar, we find staple grains to represent the life-line of the worker, the basic com-
modity that indicates the possibility for reproduction and survival. Because life
threatens the economy with both its tremendous force of reproduction (in terms
of population growth) and with the threat of the extinction of the worker, food is
introduced into the economy, as it might be into a body, as a pacifying and yet
determining economic factor. Ricardo uses food in the principles in order to
mediate between the worker and the capitalist, between wages and profits. The
life force of the labouring bodies that create value is therefore subdued, not only
through ratios of population growth, but also through the empirical study of food
sources and their prices on the market. But because the natural world is subject
to its own fluctuations, it becomes obvious that even the location of corn as the
mediating commodity between the worker and the capitalist is not as stable as it
might need to be in order to eradicate the most basic contingencies of life itself.
While we have seen the ontological status of the labourer radically altered in
terms of the workers’ orientation toward toil, time and ultimately death, the epis-
temological consequences of this embodied premise of value are crucial if we
want to understand the structure of Ricardo’s architectonic. I would like to argue
that the ontological status of the labourer demonstrates the real, material con-
sequences of an idealist rationalization of the economy, but is not tantamount to
the epistemology of this idealism itself. In part this is because Ricardo distin-
guishes between different types of economic subjects in his work, and the
labourer, as we shall later see, is not granted the same intellectual status as
the rational capital-wielding economic agent or the political economist. It is the
privileged relationship to knowledge of the latter two agents that sheds light on
the nature of Ricardo’s architectonic and, ultimately on the material reality of
the labourer himself.
In the context of the history of economic thought scholars tend to agree17 that
unlike Smith Ricardo gives value a single and identifiable origin. There is also
agreement that unlike the Physiocrats he locates the source of value in men
rather than in the fertility of the soil and the mysteries of the natural world.18 So
with Ricardo, it tends to be understood that we can actually claim knowledge of
the object that produces wealth by locating it in the very subjects of the
economy. I believe, however, that the epistemological consequences of the
embodied labour theory of value go much further than an identifiable origin.
Instead, we must focus upon the role that labour plays within the structure of his
economic thought, within the architecture of his economy.
With the backs of men underneath the weight of the entire economy, Ricardo
is able, and this can be traced through to modern neoclassical and neoliberal eco-
nomics, to ground all motion within the economy in a real material source, while
at the same time abstracting the very nature of this labour to fit into a schema of
distribution. In other words, labour serves as a real material ground to the world
of production, but mysteriously shifts from an a posteriori ground to an a priori
category when we consider interrelationships in the economy, when we consider
the movement of capital and bodies. A veritable Kantian nightmare, complete
with an a priori taken from experience and purportedly known in and of itself for
its qualities of production, labour becomes idealized, is made intangible, and
holds as an absolutely necessary condition for the possibility of knowing the
economy. The frailty of this architectonic, however, resides in the fact that
although labour is posited as the original condition of possible economic experi-
ence, it is not originally conceived as being either transcendental or synthetic.
What this means is that although an idealist structure, complete with rules about
the limits of knowledge and refusals to understand objects in and of themselves,
is desirable in Ricardian terms, it could never be realized with such a contingent
and spurious point of departure. Labour is too bound up in the production of
food, in the conditions of the soil, in the environment surrounding the worker to
ever serve as an a priori, and yet we know that it is almost always the condition
for the possibility of value.19 While Marx takes this moment of labour and
grounds it materially within a dialectical understanding of the economy (hence
the importance of beginning Capital with the commodity), Ricardo is forced to
abstract labour immediately and recuperate it into what I would like to argue is
an idealist economic schematism. A certain unknowable character always haunts
the category of labour, which perhaps continues to explain why Ricardo was so
terribly preoccupied with the discovery of an invariable standard of value, of a
truly transcendental category for his empirical models. The difficulties of this
starting point will become more and more apparent as we work our way specifi-
cally through his architectonic, as we work our way through the schema of
distribution.
Even though labour is the unified source of value, not all labour, claims Ricardo, is
the same. He is not making a distinction between manual and intellectual labour
per se, but acknowledging the different qualities of distinct forms of work. The
distinction made between different types of labour is not important in relation to
the relative value of commodities, but only in terms of the differing compensation,
or differing wages, paid to the worker for his time. We might assume, given Ricar-
do’s method, that there would be some empirical evidence from which he justifies
the differing price of labour. This is not the case, however, because he is not
making claims about the nature of the value produced by the different sorts of
labour, but only discussing it in terms of its price, or the labourer’s wage. In effect
we see that once we leave the initial ground of the embodied source of labour, the
laws of distribution, in this case the distribution of money wages for the produc-
tion of distinct commodities, do not rest on material ground, despite the fact that
the material ground of labour is its legitimating premise.
An idealized hierarchy of the empirical valuation of different types of labour is
schematized into Ricardo’s architectonic from its second principle. Meritocracy is
maintained through custom in Ricardo’s differentiation between the respective
prices of labour. He explains that the relative value of commodities is not affected
by the wage given to any particular type of worker because the determination of
the relative value of different types of labour occurred a long time ago, and is
subject to little current fluctuation. In his words,
The estimation in which different qualities of labour are held comes soon to
be adjusted in the market with sufficient precision for all practical purposes,
and depends much on the comparative skill of the labourer, and intensity of
the labour performed. The scale, once formed, is liable to little variation.
(20)
Estimation is a particularly interesting concept here, because it echoes (as

Cannan and Sraffa point out) Smith’s concept of esteem.20 In his Theory of
Moral Sentiments Smith establishes a theoretical framework of social relations
by examining custom and etiquette along with other forms of politesse that we
might associate with the aristocratic and upwardly positioned social classes.21 In
much the same way as Smith explains his famous ‘invisible hand’ with a coinci-
dence between social custom (motivated, always by the individual’s desire to be
accepted among his peers, in order, ultimately to be able to engage in business or
other instrumental transactions with them later) and economic laws, Ricardo
here uses the traditional esteem or social worth of differing types of labour, to
hold within the system of economic law. The difference lies in the fact that
Ricardo does not seek to explain the initial economic laws of distribution by way
of custom; he only accepts custom as having correctly assessed the ‘comparative
skill’ and ‘intensity’ of labour.
While this is but a small moment in Ricardo’s text, and while this principle
seeks primarily to maintain the split between the price of labour and the value of
goods, it does reveal the ease with which certain labour is privileged even among
embodied labourers. The labour of a working jeweller is more valuable, in terms
of the wage that must be compensated him, than that of a common labourer, due
to the degree of skill involved, but the intensity or physical duress that might be
involved in common labour falls to the wayside in this calculation. Clearly we
see that Ricardo privileges intellectual labour, but more importantly we can
come to understand how life continues to operate as an externality to this eco-
nomic reasoning, as the body of the common labourer implies little in the valu
ation of wages. Embedded within this small comment on the relationship
between different types of labour resides the kernel of conservatism necessary
for liberal thought. Although Ricardo might claim that rational economic agents
exist and although he might also claim that they are equal in their formal status
as rational agents, he takes great pains to integrate an irrational and customary
system of meritocracy within even the least rational of classes. That is, even
though labouring bodies underpin the entire economy with their ability to create
value and are granted little agency of reason by Ricardo, a hierarchical structure
of skill emerges.
Because manual labour sits on the bottom rung of epistemological privilege
within capitalist society, it is only the formal aspect of manual labour that
Ricardo indulges with a rationalization:
We may fairly conclude, that whatever inequality there might originally

have been in them, whatever the ingenuity, skill, or time necessary for the
acquirement of one species of manual dexterity more than another, it con-
tinues nearly the same from one generation to another; or at least, that the
variation is very inconsiderable from year to year, and therefore, can have
little effect, for short periods, on the relative values of commodities.
(22)
The degree of differentiation between types of manual labour is on the one hand
given legitimacy by the strength of traditional hierarchies of labour, and on the
other is absolutely irrelevant so long as the degree of separation between types
of labour does not alter significantly from year to year, from one economic cycle
to the next. We can understand the nature of Ricardo’s system already from the
second principle; it is a theoretical structure that concerns itself with the substan-
tive aspect of labour when it is deemed an interruption to the natural movement
of capital, to the natural division of price. The nature of value is never ques-
tioned in and of itself because so long as custom holds the distinctions between
types of labour in check, there is no instrumental reason to explore its relation-
ship to the human community, to desire, or even to need itself. That one type of
labour should be better compensated than another might be a valid claim in this
system if Ricardo were to elaborate upon its original estimation, but the sound-
ness of this argument must never come into question lest life, lest the bodies of
labourers, threaten the stability of economic movement.
The stable and predictable character of economic movement, of course, is the

key question in the theoretical configuration of the natural laws of distribution.
With this in mind, Ricardo introduces the notion of durable capital in relation to
the labour that resides within this capital. He is careful not to approach various
forms of durable capital as constitutive of any sort of invariable standard of
value, because the labour residing within them cannot be granted an immutable
character. He is also cautious when approaching the relationship between wages
and the price of machinery or tools, insofar as it must be first and foremost
understood by its effect upon the movement of capital, on the time of distribu-
tion. The economic distinctions between types of durable capital are threefold,
and we will need to examine each in order to see how the labouring body
becomes embedded within commodities used for production only by means of a
strict quantification.
First, Ricardo gives us a principle which invokes the value-creating property
of labour into not only regular commodities, but into the production process as
well. In this way, commodities necessary to production are understood in much
the same way as commodities for sale on the market at large. The principle
states: ‘Not only the labour applied immediately to commodities affect their
value, but, the labour also which is bestowed on the implements, tools and build-
ings, with which such labour is assisted’ (22). The scope of value created by
labour is therefore expanded, giving material ground, initially at least, to the
manufactured tools of the economy. While this may seem to reintroduce the
materiality that appears to be lost after the initial positing of labour as the source
of all value, it in fact serves merely as a segue to the abstraction of labour in
general. As such, very poor and often confused distinctions between value and
price, between wages and profit, characterize the principles pertaining to durable
capital. A few particular instances will elaborate upon these confusions.
Labour, as a premise, must be understood to reside within tools, supplements
to production, and buildings. Value is therefore given a longevity exterior to the
labourer, and this is manifested in the longevity of the commodity, or its durabil-
ity. We see that labour as the premise of value lasts through its material manifes-
tation in commodities that will help with further production. Of course, Ricardo
does not look at this labour stored in commodities in a purely material way – he
considers the relevance of the value bestowed in durable commodities in terms
of exchange value. He explains that the
exchange value of commodities produced would be in proportion to the

labour bestowed on their production; not on their immediate production
only, but on all those implements or machines required to give effect to the
particular labour to which they were applied.
(24)
Labour is not merely useful in the immediate sense; we can also understand it
through its survival in time. But its survival in time actually signifies its contri-
bution to the value of the commodities produced with the tools and machinery of
production. To survive the effects of time is both to lend value initially in the
production of the machine, and then to allow for additional exchange value to be
garnered through the economy of labour which is achieved by working with
time-saving tools. When he explains that
economy in the use of labour never fails to reduce the relative value of a
commodity, whether the saving be in labour necessary to the manufacture of
the commodity itself, or in that necessary to the formulation of the capital,
by the aid of which it is produced,
(26)
he is indicating that relative values might be lessened, but not that this will
necessarily have any effect on the value produced for the capitalist (profits) or
on the price of the labour with which this value is produced (wages). Profits do
not fit into the same temporal schema because they depend on the wage of labour
(the quantification in relation to the material necessities of reproduction), not on
the time of labour involved in any particular process of production. In such a
way we see profits and value separated, even if both are tied to the actual mater-
ial existence of the labourer. This actual and material existence of the labourer is
only obscured, however, by Ricardo’s fixation upon the distribution (or crude
circulation) of capital already created, value generated on non-abstracted mater-
ial grounds.
On a methodological level Ricardo should not be able to make such a clear
distinction between profit and value. Value is produced by labour, given in spe-
cific amounts of time, and as such affects the prices of commodities, even if not
in a formula of direct causal relation. Wages (though again, in no strict causal
formula) depend on the prices of commodities necessary to the survival of the
worker. The only way in which Ricardo can distinguish between value and price
is to make labour abstract, grant it a numerical value instead of a sensual or
useful form. The delay in the value found in durable capital, its latent potential-
ity as it waits to be used in tools and machines, is the first step to disembodying
the worker’s material existence from exchange value, and thus allows that the
worker become divorced from price, even if his own existence is subsequently
determined by the prices of necessary commodities. The worker’s interest can
then only be represented by wages, because wages are measured in money in the
same way as price, and value, as the product of material labour, is no longer
granted any causal legitimacy. The role that wages play in the determination of
profit (a proposition that Ricardo must maintain vehemently) holds his architec-
tonic in place, holds the relationship between price and value in a spurious unity.
It is spurious because the ground of value has already been subsumed by money
quantities, measured in time and mediated by the purchasing power of money.
Labour power, in this schema of distribution, is usurped by purchasing power,
and price, therefore, overshadows value.
It is of particular importance that Ricardo introduces the use of a hypothetical
standard of value in money at this juncture in his Principles. As a mediating
agent money requires the universality of the invariable standard. Of course
money, as Ricardo willingly admits, could never be an invariable standard, but if
a stable ratio is desired between wages and price (at least in terms of its effect on
profits), the medium of exchange cannot be understood to be in flux. The result
of this situation is again what should be both the starting and ending point of
Ricardo’s architectonic; the invariable standard in its very impossibility. Instead
we are left with the difficulties that Ricardo was forced to accept with each new
edition of his Principles; we are left to cope with the tension between wages,
price and profit without the firm measurable ground of an absolute form of
value.22
While we might be able to assess the change in exchange values for any
single commodity (because we can know if it takes more or less labour time to
produce, we can measure the durability of the machinery and tools involved),
this serves no real purpose in assessing the relative values of commodities,
because no standard commodity stands between them, no standard commodity
can serve as a landmark to evaluate the relative ease of producing one over the
other. Time is not a sufficient measure when we consider the fact that labour
produces differently (i.e. different quantities of commodities) in different cir-
cumstances. Relative values of commodities cannot be measured by time units
alone, unless one could assess a time unit in relation to every individual com-
modity produced. This might work in simple examples involving fish and
game,23 but these examples are derived precisely from a context with limited
variables and a small amount of relatively durable tools. The point is not to
establish specific scenarios but to rely on a general and unwavering rule.
We are left to ask ourselves the following question: If things, i.e. commodi-
ties, never rise or fall in value because of anything other than the quantity of
labour (measured in time), why do we need an invariable standard? The answer
is twofold. On the one hand Ricardo is not actually trying to measure commodi-
ties in terms of value, rather, he displaces value with price. Price becomes rela-
tive given its relationship with wages and profits, and also because it can only be
compared with other commodities which undergo the same uncertainty in value.
On the other hand, there is a serious disjuncture between exchange value as
determined by labour time and relative price. This disjuncture between the actual
material circumstances and nuances of the labour process (and hence the meas-
urable amount of time it takes to produce), and the abstract notion of price,
requires an abstract mediator: the invariable standard. So the notion that wages
are determined in relationship to profit and subsequently affect price holds firm.
What does not hold, however, is the fact that within a system of necessary cau-
salities, the relative prices of commodities have no relationship to value insofar
as it relates to labour. The life of labour, not only in terms of the goods that it
requires to survive, but also in its sensuous and often individualized form, must
be conceptually obliterated as it poses a threat to the measurability of commodi-
ties in relation to one another. The logic of the system of distribution can there-
fore not tolerate the material grounds that produce value in the first place. This
conclusion will become more apparent as Ricardo outlines the next two princi-
ples pertaining to durable capital. We will see the complete reification of labour
within the laws of distribution, and the subjectivity that produces will become
subsumed by the rationality of those who control the movement of capital.
The differentiation between fixed and circulating capital, as Ricardo begins to
approach it in his discussion of the varying durability of capital, is of great
importance to Marx in his Theories of Surplus Value. Marx comments that
it must be regarded as a great merit that Ricardo associates the differences

in fixed and circulating capital with the varying periods of turnover of
capital and that he deduces all these differences from the varying periods of
circulation, i.e., in fact from the circulation or reproduction period of
capital.
(1968, 176)
In Ricardo’s following principles there is an understanding of the cycles or

reproduction of capital in its varying forms, albeit within a crudely developed
theory of circulation. I believe that this notion of circulation is crude for various
reasons, including the overarching confusion between empirical and abstract
aspects of the economy. This very same confusion further unfolds in the last two
principles concerning the effects of the varying durability of capital.
Ricardo’s fourth principle states that ‘the quantity of labour bestowed on the
production of commodities regulates their relative value, considerably modified
by the employment of machinery and other fixed capital’ (30). The most inter-
esting aspect of this principle is that the alteration in the value of labour is con-
tingent upon both the durability of the machines that it both produces and uses.
Further, the value of labour does not directly translate into the value of a com-
modity because the notion of time, as it pertains to the circulation of commodi-
ties, comes into play. The alteration of the value of labour that resides within any
particular commodity is causally related to the ratio between present labour
power and the latent potentiality of labour that resides within the tools and
machinery required to produce that particular commodity.
Interestingly enough, Ricardo claims that these differing proportions alter the
value of labour itself. Therefore the value of labour is mediated by its relation-
ship to the tools and machines that it requires. The quantity of labour required to
produce any particular commodity is thus complicated by the introduction of
machinery, because even though labour is the source of all value, it is not a value
that can be consistent even within measurable units of time. But an interesting
conundrum arises as the value of labour as it resides within the finished com-
modity is also modified by the time it takes commodities to get to market.
Ricardo explains:
On account then of the different degrees of durability of their capitals, or,

which is the same thing, on account of the time which must elapse before one
set of commodities can be brought to market, they will be valuable, not
exactly in proportion to the quantity of labour bestowed on them, they will not
be two to one, but something more, to compensate for the greater length of
time which must elapse before the most valuable can be brought to market.
(34)
This new invocation of time within distribution allows Ricardo to establish

another set of ratios. The longer it takes to bring something to market, he claims,
the lesser the value of the durable capital involved, as truly durable capital
always reduces the amount of actual labour time that it takes to produce a com-
modity. Time, in this sense, indicates progress and improvement in the produc-
tion process. It also denotes the ability to produce greater quantities of
commodities quickly, and therefore it creates more profit in a shorter period.
Distribution is thus measured on a frequent, even daily basis. Here we do not see
historical time or abstract time in an explicit manner, and we shift away from the
time of the progress of production (even though this is clearly invoked). Instead
we find the specified time of each commodity. In this fashion Ricardo can finally
link time and value, through the toil of the worker, in a causal relationship. He
claims that ‘every improvement of machinery, in tools, in buildings, in raising
the raw material, saves labour, and enables us to produce the commodity to
which the improvement is applied with more facility, and consequently its value
alters’ (36). So not only does the value of the commodity shift, but also the value
of labour. What we have here is not only Ricardo’s characteristic conflation of
value and price, but also of labour and commodities. While there is no doubt that
one could argue that labour is a commodity that is purchased by the capitalist,
Ricardo is not making such a claim. Instead, the labourer is bound to the time of
the production process, mediated by similar labour as it resides in tools, and ulti-
mately of no more significance to the final value of commodities than the tools
which were used to produce the commodity. The knowledge or skill of the
worker is completely lost in this formulation, and the value of his labour is found
only in the time that it takes to produce. Labourers and machines exist on the
same plane in this relationship of distribution, and their respective values are
measured as though by an invariable standard, that of industrially driven time.24
An important caveat arises in this discussion of the relationship between
value, labour and time. Ricardo asserts, in the midst of a discussion of the circu-
lation of capital in the production of capital, the invariable ‘fact’ that ‘there can
be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits’ (35). In context of pro-
duction Ricardo indicates that the price of labour, i.e. the wages paid to the
labourer in order to maintain his own subsistence, has a direct effect on the profit
gained by the capitalist. But here the relationship between capitalist and worker
is unspoken, and thus the value of labour is reduced to price as given by an indi-
vidual capitalist to an individual worker. We can see that the relationship
between labourer and capitalist, which should be completely abstract given the
previous quantification of labour power through time, is now reduced to the spe-
cific ratios chosen by the capitalist in any given circumstance. In a quick theoret-
ical move Ricardo is able to take an abstract relationship, deny its abstraction,
and rob it of the usefulness it would provide to his theory of distribution by
ignoring the relationship between labour and what he would term profit. Instead
of lending labour its sensuous and material character which was so necessary as
a premise to the production of value, he reduces labour to a wage-profit relation-
ship, while at the same time stripping his abstracted schema of its universal
necessity. His modification to the rule of the consistency of the value of com-
modities in relation to the amount of labour required, is a particular disruption of
the universal rule, a fracturing of the abstracted premises that have already
escaped the initial material ground of labour. In part we must understand this in
terms of Ricardo’s lack of understanding of surplus value (as opposed to price),
and in part we must see it in terms of the relative dispensability of labouring
bodies in the face of capital. This dispensability is not random but arbitrary, and
shifts given Ricardo’s particular concern for cost-price in varying economic sce-
narios. Instead of a consistent or naturalized law of distribution, there is a series
of contingent and spurious rules of the relationship between disembodied labour
and the naturalized laws of bourgeois capital (not distribution). Ironically enough
these laws are naturalized in the case of fixed and circulating capital through the
mechanism of industrial time.
Ricardo’s fifth principle – ‘the principle that value does not vary with the rise
or fall of wages, modified also by the unequal durability of capital, and by the
unequal rapidity with which it is returned to its employer’ (38) – follows closely
from the fourth. He again separates wages from value, without considering the
relationship that exists between value and price in his earlier conceptualization
of economic movement. In part this is to lend the complexity of commodity
pricing a smooth and natural movement. In part it removes the material concerns
of labour – especially in terms of social reproduction – from the question of the
reproduction of capital. If wages are separated from the value of commodities,
and if price is not similarly removed, we see that a certain logic of industrial
progress is championed, along with the benevolence of the bourgeois mode of
production, albeit without explicitly moralizing tones.
Industrial capital is privileged throughout Ricardo’s laws of distribution, as
we have seen, in part because it has already been understood as inherent to the
natural world of the economy. But here this naturalization is especially false,
especially removed from the natural grounds upon which the economy, and its
agents, rely. Ricardo’s discussion of machinery (or fixed capital) in this section
is particularly emblematic of the de-naturalized movement of capital. He argues,
for example, that machinery produces extra profit, but, at the same time, that it
will benefit not only industrial capitalists, but the public at large. Specifically he
claims that ‘it is the public benefited by machinery: these mute agents are always
the produce of much less labour than that which they displace, even when they
are of the same money value’ (42). Of particular note is the agency that Ricardo
gives machines, or, as he puts it, ‘mute agents’. Labourers are not credited with
the displacement of other labourers, nor are they attributed influence in the realm
of industrial capital. As I have already argued, this is because the labourer is
sealed within a premise – the production of all value – and kept there while
being stripped of real influence and intelligence within the abstracted laws of
distribution.
More importantly, however, we must note that Ricardo later recants on this
position, on the benefits that machinery might bring to the ‘public’ or more spe-
cifically to the labouring classes. In his chapter ‘On Machinery’ he admits that
‘the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the
interests of the class of labourers’ (388). He goes on to explain the error inherent
to his claim in the fifth principle:
My mistake arose from the supposition, that whenever the net income of a
society increased, its gross income would also increase; I now, however, see
reason to be satisfied that the one fund, from which landlords and capitalists
derive their revenue, may increase, while the other, that upon which the
labouring class might depend, may diminish, and therefore it follows, if I
am right, that the same cause which may increase the net revenue of the
country, may at the same time render the population redundant, and deterio-
rate the condition of the labourer.
(Ibid.)
Here Ricardo is at last considering the broader class relations that shape the dis-
tribution of pools of capital, and in so doing recognizes that the progress of
industrial production is not necessarily to the advantage of all. We must ask our-
selves, however, why Ricardo did not, in the third edition of his Principles, alter
the fifth principle to correspond to this correction. While this was perhaps simply
an oversight, it seems far more probable that he recognized the importance of
keeping the complexity of class relations and social interactions out of the
abstracted and temporally smooth principles of distribution. Further, the notion
of naturalized economic movement cannot be maintained within an economic
sphere that recognizes social interactions as dynamic, class-based and contingent
upon human agency. As it stands, this admission of the pernicious effects of
machinery on the labouring classes continues to obscure any agency that labour-
ing bodies might have in the economic sphere. It continues to privilege the epis-
temological status of those who control capital, as their status is obtained through
capital in the first place. So while the material conditions of the labourer who no
longer labours are taken into account, the material conditions that inform the
relationship between labour and capital, as they were outlined in Ricardo’s first
principle, are still notably absent. Bodies begin to matter insofar as they are not
productively employed, or are wasting away, or reside outside the bounds of
economic time. But economic time never regains the bodies that set it in motion,
never incorporates the human relationships that so dynamically gave it force.
The continued and impoverished abstractions of economic movement, insofar as
they relate to the epistemological status of workers, capitalists and the econo-
mists who prescribe them, come to a culmination in Ricardo’s last guiding prin-
ciples – those of the invariable standard and the inevitable variations that affect
economic laws.
Although the invariable measure of value is both conspicuously present and

absent throughout Ricardo’s discussion of value, and although we have already
seen it appear in nearly every section discussed, some comment on its role within
Ricardo’s architectonic will shed some light on both the subjectivity of the indi-
vidual that labours, and on the epistemological authority of the political econo-
mist.25 Labouring bodies once formed the ground of the economy, the ground of
Ricardo’s schema of distribution. But since they have been lost, absorbed, over-
whelmed and even destroyed by the abstractions of economic time and the laws
of distribution, a new form of consistent movement, a new form of theoretical
stability is needed to sustain his spurious architectonic. This new ground must
not be material in the same way as labour, because the very materiality of labour
gives rise to its contingency, to its precarious relationship to death, life and, ulti-
mately, time. An abstracted standard of invariability can never manifest itself in
objects. It can also never really be immaterial, as Ricardo continues to seek out
an object to demonstrate its principle. So the abstraction of the invariable stand-
ard is truly impoverished – unable to be rooted in the material, but continuously
requiring the material in order to substantiate its existence, it becomes the impos-
sibility of Ricardo’s system itself. If the aim had only been to find examples of
the variations in the price of commodities, then a simple series of observations
about the way in which particular prices vary given labour time and the durabil-
ity of the capital involved would have been sufficient to draw out general ten-
dencies and relationships. But that was the endeavour of Adam Smith, and
certainly not an endeavour which conforms to James Mill’s plain rule of utility.
Instead, Ricardo’s need, or desire, for naturalized laws of distribution requires
an invariable truth, a new and veritable a priori that does not suffer the contin-
gencies of labour. The trouble for Ricardo is that a posteriori knowledge remains
the only possibility within his empirically driven system, and thus his abstraction
remains incomplete. I believe that what Ricardo ultimately desires is what Kant
holds dear to his architectonic; a synthetic a priori that holds for all experience
yet is not derived from experience. The dream is to know what will be true of
the movement of objects, the organization of society even, without reducing uni-
versal laws to the contingencies of the particular, which, it appears, are always
rooted in labour.
It is particularly fascinating that Ricardo chose a material aspect of humanity
– labour – to represent the universality of value, and then denied its universality
both through and because of the complexity of its activity. In its wake we find
the immobilization of history simultaneous with the perfect movement of capital,
with the perfect consistency in the production of the most valued commodity:
gold. Ricardo explains that ‘[gold] would be a perfect measure of value for all
things produced under the same circumstances precisely as itself, but for no
others’ (45). If gold were to be the perfect measure of value for all things pro-
duced under the same circumstances, then it would conform to the ultimate
desire of the political economist, it would give him the power to hypostatize the
experience of production, the experience of the labourer. But the desires of the
political economist are what remain to be explored, and the key to his epistemo-
logical subjectivity resides within this understanding.
The importance of the invariable standard is particularly interesting at this
juncture in economic theory, given what it tells us of the expectations that the
political economist, Ricardo in this instance, holds of his own knowledge and
authority. The subjectivity, in epistemological terms, of the political economist,
is contingent upon the very thing that the invariable standard demands – the
unvarying truth underlying economic law. And so the lure of gold, a nostalgic
symbol of value and truth, takes hold of Ricardo’s imagination. As Foucault
describes it, gold, in the pre-classical period, held the desires of men in tandem
with knowledge, with truth:
Between all the things that man may need or desire, and the glittering,
hidden veins where those metals grow in darkness, there is an absolute
correspondence. . . . This celestial and exhaustive calculation can be accom-
plished by none other than God: it corresponds to that other calculation that
brings each and every element of microcosm into relation with a corre-
sponding element in the macrocosm. . . . It makes those things that are
brought into being by the hands of men correspond with the treasures buried
in the earth since the creation of the world. The marks of similitude, because
they are a guide to knowledge, are addressed to the perfection of heaven;
the signs of exchange, because they satisfy desire, are sustained by the dark,
dangerous and accursed glitter of metal. An equivocal glitter, for it repro-
duces in the depths of the earth that other glitter that sings at the far end of
the night: it resides there like an inverted promise of happiness, and, because
metal resembles the stars, the knowledge of all these perilous treasures is at
the same time knowledge of the world. And thus reflection upon wealth has
its pivot in the broadest speculation of the cosmos, just as, inversely, pro-
found knowledge of the order of the world must lead to the secret of metals
and the possession of wealth.
(187–8)
Foucault’s point about pre-classical economic conceptions of wealth is crucial;

to know wealth from the earth is to know the cosmos, to know what really con-
stitutes wealth, to understand the origin of gold, is to have an absolute know-
ledge, to have a grasp of the totality of the human environment. A parallel then
arises with Ricardo’s thought, where he might know the laws of distribution, the
very nature underlying and directing the economy, if he could only rely on a
pure and invariable standard of value, if he could only rely on gold. So the
knowledge of the political economist is tied to his desire that this shiny sub-
stance reflect the truth of value, even though he is forced to admit that it does
not. To know the universal truth of value and distribution is left to Ricardo, but
his lack of an invariable standard and his inability to find a solid yet abstract
truth both cripple his sense of intellectual authority.
Ricardo explains that:
If, then, I may suppose myself to be possessed of a standard so nearly

approaching to an invariable one, the advantage is, that I shall be enabled to
speak of the variation of other things, without embarrassing myself on every
occasion with the consideration of the possible alteration in the value of the
medium in which price and value are estimated.
(46)
Here Ricardo writes in a manner that is uncharacteristically frank. In an obvious

sense, we know this to be because he is unsure of any invariable standard, and
by the third edition of his Principles he is in fact convinced of the impossibility
thereof. But the use of the first person is no longer merely a rhetorical device to
signal humility, much as it was and must be when feigning deference to natural
economic movement, but also a description of his subjective position in relation
to knowledge in general. The genuine certainty without which the economist
cannot substantiate his epistemological position, comes through a ‘possession’,
insofar as it could be manifested in an object, though not a material or contingent
object. The knowledge of the political economist would be perfect if it were
omniscient knowledge that resembles a knowledge of the noumenal realm – an
impossible yet stable realm of truth. It is particularly fascinating that an idealist
desire to be possessed of the truth of value is the result of a supposedly empiri-
cally driven inquiry.
Perhaps even more illuminating is the fact that deviance and variation are
both a source of embarrassment, shame even, for the political economist. The
use of political economy is clear – it is not merely to describe, but to explain and
predict. The problem, the embarrassment that Ricardo continues to encounter
throughout his Principles is that he can neither explain without knowledge of an
invariable standard, nor predict without the stability of that explanation. The
knowledge that he desires after the disavowal of the epistemological validity of
the labouring subject, is ideal (in the realm of the intangible) yet it must apply to
the objects of this world. And so Ricardo must proceed as if he knew an invaria-
ble standard, as if gold somehow still related the material and tangible to the
natural and inevitable laws of movement.26
And with this as if Ricardo goes on, throughout his Principles, without being
‘stopped by the word price’,27 without compromising his epistemological status
as knower of the economy through its natural law, without revaluing the know-
ledge of the labourer, without lending the natural movement of capital the a
priori which it so desperately requires in order to structure this architectonic. But
the types of subjectivities within the economy, the labouring bodies of workers
and the knowing minds of the political economists, are not yet all addressed, as
those who control capital in their capacities as landlords and industrial capitalists
have not come into the picture in the initial principles of distribution. Interest-
ingly enough, these subjects, those with the power to control and in fact alter
economic movement, are absent from the primary structure of the economic
logic of distribution. We have already seen how class relations cannot be a part
of the impoverished abstractions that found Ricardo’s theorizations of the
economy. Appropriately then, they reside outside of the initial laws of the
economy and come into play in his discussion of taxation and the state. Though
we might expect that their roles would become clear in his discussion of rent and
wages, they are more explicitly discussed in isolation from labouring bodies, in
the realm of taxation. This is because taxation applies primarily to those who
possess and move capital, rather than those merely seeking subsistence, or pro-
tection from real material scarcity, in the economic realm. Let us then turn to the
subjects who move capital, and look to uncover the relationship that Ricardo
draws between the interests of the state, capitalists and landlords, and the natural
movement of capital.
Taxation and the subjects of capital

The subject of taxation has received little critical attention in the study of Ricard-
ian economics. As Takuo Dome points out, ‘despite the fact that Ricardo dis-
cussed taxation as an important subject in economics, his theory of taxation has
rarely been referred to compared with his theories of value, distribution, and
growth’ (1992, 43). Apart from the work of Shoup (1960), and the work of
Dome (1992), which both deal with taxation in terms of tax incidence, no recent
studies illuminate the contribution that Ricardo’s theory of taxation adds to his
general political economy, nor to the development of economic subjectivity in
particular.28 I will argue, in this final section, that Ricardo’s treatment of taxation
in fact offers another subjective sphere that encompasses those who move capital
and binds these individuals to both capital and the state. While the labouring
body and the political economist are implicated in the structure and application
of taxation, no subject holds so much at stake in the mode of taxation as the
agent of capital, or the subject who exists as part of the economy in more than a
labouring (and therefore subsisting) capacity.
Ricardo’s general comments on taxation reveal the productive premise of
taxable subjects. Here we find that the labouring body is still the ground of the
economy insofar as labourers are consuming bodies who also produce. Produc-
tivity does not imply the labourer but rather the ability to employ labourers to
further industry, to further production in general. In particular we see that:
It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed,

but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed
by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value.
When we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is,
that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is consumed by
productive instead of unproductive labourers. There can be no greater error
than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.
(151n)
This bears on Ricardo’s integration of the theory of taxation into the general
economy insofar as it implies that ‘if there be no increased production or dimin-
ished unproductive consumption on the part of the people, the taxes will neces-
sarily fall on capital, that is to say, they will impair the fund allotted to
productive consumption’ (150–1). So taxation must, from its first principle, not
present the opportunity for a situation in which the natural movement or impetus
of capital is blocked. While we will see why this does not mean that raw mater-
ials or necessities for the labourer must face a differential tax, it also implies that
in the maintenance of natural economic movement the burden of taxation simply
cannot result in a significant diminution of the capital of those who might use it
productively, i.e. in industrially or agriculturally productive ways. The reinvest-
ment of capital into the economy is solidified by the maxim that an increase in
wages will result in the diminution of profits – which means that any tax that
increases the wages of labouring bodies will in fact thwart the capitalist’s efforts
at accumulation. The limitation of the sheer volume of accumulated capital then
translates, for Ricardo, into a necessary lack of productivity, for no capitalist
would willingly suffer a fall in his rate of profit, given its naturalized rate in the
economy. We might begin to see, therefore, how the agents who move capital
are privileged within any Ricardian scheme of taxation, because they are natu-
rally bound to a certain rate of profit.29 But to leave this subjective position at
that would ignore the fact that there is an epistemological privilege that the
movers of capital also enjoy – that of an intimate and rational connection to the
logic of the movement and distribution of capital.
The labouring body, in Ricardo’s discussion of taxation, is characterized in
two ways, both of which give a relevant counterpoint to the intellectual subject-
ivity of the mover of capital. In the first case, this body is tied to the rate of profit
through a necessary living wage. For this reason, the labouring body cannot bear
much of the burden of taxation, at least not if it might affect the labourer’s ability
to survive and reproduce. The labouring body, insofar as it is a premise to eco-
nomic movement, poses a real structural constraint in the realm of taxation. So,
to raise taxes on raw produce or on wages (insofar as taxes on wages represent
taxes of the necessary commodities for survival) would effectively raise wages,
and with this rise in wages, diminish profits. If we take for example the effects
that Ricardo claims the Corn Laws have on profits, we see that this form of taxa-
tion proves to be an impediment to the ‘natural’ movement of capital. The
worker, because he must subsist, then becomes an obstacle to the movement of
capital, as his wages must rise to support his survival. In Ricardo’s view, capital
must not be controlled by the State in a manner such as the Corn Laws or similar
schemas of taxation. Capital must only be entrusted to those who ‘know’ and
‘act’ in the interest of capital (in other words, in the interest of accumulation) –
even though the individuals who possess this knowledge (the movers of capital)
are necessarily and subjectively implicated in furthering an economy split
between subsistence and accumulation. Or, perhaps it is because the very forma-
tion of the capitalist subjectivity occurs within this exploitative structure that
they are best suited to actively engage in the logic of capital redistribution, as in
the case of taxation, even though it is they who stand to lose the most.
Strangely enough, despite Ricardo’s dramatic description of the difference
between the burden of taxation on the worker, for whom it is a matter of life and
death, and the burden of taxation on the capitalist, for whom it is a matter of the
rate of profit and the productive re-employment of capital, the weight of taxation
on raw produce is ultimately left to fall on each individual within the economy
in a measure equal to his means. While the worker remains constrained and is
labelled as a constraint, Ricardo ignores the structural or class-based difference
between workers and capitalists, and calls for the worker’s proportional contri-
bution to the coffers of the State: ‘no class or community can escape them [taxes
on raw produce], and each pays according to his means’ (167). There is, despite
the drastically different implications of taxation on the labouring subject and the
capitalist subject, a universal moment at play here, as Ricardo still relies on
Smith’s four maxims with regard to taxation.30 These four maxims work under
the general principle of reducing the ‘evils’ that taxation brings to the population
in general. All subjects are in this instance bound together in a state of Bentham
where the external and nefarious hand of taxation must not trump the self-
subsistence of the individual. That the ‘evil’ of economic burden or constraint of
the labourer–capitalist relation does not require maxims that alter the structure of
distribution, highlights the privilege of capitalist subjects throughout Ricardo’s
work. Because of taxation’s universal character, however, we see concern for
burden arise primarily in this portion of Ricardo’s work. Subsequently, the State,
not the laws of distribution, becomes the broker of the unjust, and the capitalist
and labourer alike become the unjustly targeted subjects.
In the second place, under any regime of significant taxation, the worker is
seen as anathema to the well-being of production within the State, which in fact
is only a development of the paradoxical concept that the worker is a structural
constraint on accumulation due to the relationship between wages and profit. The
premise of the creation of value that the worker once provided to the structure of
the economy is now almost reversed, as taxation takes the power of the labourer
away from the capitalist and hands it over to the unproductive State:
Every new tax becomes a new charge on production, and raises natural
price. A portion of the labour of the country which was before at the dis-
posal of the contributor of the tax, is placed at the disposal of the state, and
therefore cannot be employed productively. This portion may become so
large, that sufficient surplus produce may not be left to stimulate the exer-
tions of those who usually augment by their savings the capital of the state.
Taxation has happily never yet in any country been carried so far as con-
stantly from year to year to diminish its capital. Such a state of taxation
could not long be endured; or if endured, it would be constantly absorbing
so much of the annual produce of the country as to occasion the most exten-
sive scene of misery, famine and depopulation.
(185)
The labourer, once he escapes the naturalized movement of capital, even if it is

by the imposition of taxation by the State, becomes an interruption to the
economy. This interruption results in his own, rather than the capitalist’s,
demise. The ‘most extensive scene of misery, famine and depopulation’ does not
apply to the movers of capital, but follows again from Ricardo’s Malthusian
leanings and brings itself to bear on the subsisting population. Ricardo is able to
render this relationship between labourer and general economy constant by
abstractly fixing the labouring body within the law of diminishing profits. If the
presence and toil of the labourer is in any way made more costly by the hand of
the State, it is the labourer who will perish because the rate of profit cannot be
maintained. The pre-eminence of the rate of profit, however, must be understood
in terms of the relationship between the mover of capital and capital itself, and
between this subject and the State.
We see that interruption to the movement of capital, or to the law of profits, is
tantamount to economic destruction, and would result in the structural collapse
of Ricardo’s architectonic. For this reason the only possibility of interruption
must lie in the hands of privileged subjects, or, as I have already articulated, in
those who ‘know’ and ‘act’ in the interest of capital. The epistemological privi-
lege of the movers of capital is ensured by an intellectual correspondence
between the logic of capital and the logic of the act of moving capital. While the
labouring body is stripped of all epistemological status by his implication in the
law of profits, the investing mind of the capitalist is granted status through his
enactment of choice in the direction of his capital. Even though the investment
of capital still follows a constrained logic of productivity (i.e. accumulation), the
rational agency of the mover of capital is both active and in line with the general
interests of the economy and the State as a whole. The irony here lies in the fact
that the law of profits that binds the labouring subject, is not a constraint but a
liberating moment for the subjects who move capital. The control over the move-
ment of capital, even if it is within the structure of Ricardo’s architectonic,
allows for the privilege of the capitalists because they are now enabled with the
gift of choice and economic agency. I will later show how this subjective posi-
tion follows from Smith’s mystification of the market through the invisible hand.
First, however, we must turn to see how Ricardo describes rational economic
choice as constituting the epistemological agency of the mover of capital. To
outline the relationship between the capitalist taxpayer and the state, we must
examine Ricardo’s categories of taxation. He makes clear that taxation on raw
produce is injurious to the worker and to the maintenance of productive con-
sumption. But, when it comes to taxation on profits and luxuries, and taxation in
relation to changing channels of trade, we see that the individual that identifies
with capital becomes harmonized with the interests of the State.
It is logical, within Ricardo’s architectonic, to start with taxes on profits as
these fall solely upon the capitalist. It should be noted, however, that the power
that capital gives the capitalist subject first appears in tandem with private prop-
erty, in his section on the taxation of houses. There, strangely enough, the posses-
sion of private property is attributed to toil, which indicates an agricultural slant
to Ricardo’s claims. Unlike the evil of taxation, private property is a sacred
domain that must be protected for those who have toiled to earn it.31 The labour
of property owners is here valued and the political economist is able to protect it
both practically (by suggesting that the burden of taxation on houses is unduly
onerous) and theoretically, by giving it an abstract quality and protecting the sub-
jects who have earned their gains. The discrepancy between this protection and
abstract categorization and the relatively scanty consideration of the products of
the labourer’s toil is quite notable. This distinction is exacerbated when Ricardo
describes a ‘sober-minded proprietor’ (205) who would protect property against
the whims of speculation that might befall property if it were not based on the
labour of this working and owning subject. The basis for the sobriety of the pro-
prietor’s mind is tied to the personal and physical investment in his property. This
legitimacy is also mirrored in the privilege that the mover of capital holds in the
economy because he has invested time and toil into insuring capital’s growth. The
exclusion of the industrial labourer’s stake and interest is fascinating in this new
light and lays the arbitrary naturalization of certain economic interests bare. This
becomes more apparent as we address taxation on profits and luxuries.
Ricardo outlines the effect that taxes on profits will have on the subject who
has an interest in profit. Inherent to this interest are both the desire and capacity
to move the very location of one’s production by the movement of one’s capital:
a partial tax on profits will raise the price of the commodity on which it
falls: a tax, for example, on the profits of the hatter, would raise the price of
hats; for if his profits were taxed, and not those of any other trade, his
profits, unless he raised the price of his hats, would be below the general
rate of profits, and he would quit his employment for another.
(205, emphasis added)
Here we witness the effect of choice, the ability, unlike the worker who cannot
afford to withdraw his labour, to move capital according to profitability. But
choice is not really the choice of an independent subject; it is the choice of a
subject whose very epistemological status is determined by his relationship to
capital under a specific mode of distribution, accumulation and taxation. Here
the general rate of profit is naturalized to the point of being engrained within the
rational economic decision-making strategies of capitalists. Through this theo-
retical move, we are able to understand what a rational choice might be, given
any particular capital structure if we understand the effects of the movement and
distribution of all the various forms of capital at play. This in turn links the
decisions of the individuals to the movement of capital, yet always after choos-
ing to move capital in the direction of productive reinvestment or an improved
rate of profit. What we already know is that the movement of capital is what
forces the ‘choice’ of the capitalist to occur in the first place. The movers of
capital have always already been moved by capital’s logic – it runs prior to any
particular choice, yet is recuperated by the theoretical subject in Ricardo’s archi-
tectonic to link knowledge and investment with the control of wealth. Ulti-
mately, rational economic agents (capitalists) are given choice, or presumed to
follow the logic thereof, so long as their choices follow the average rate of profit.
While this idea later manifests itself in Marx’s Capital,32 it carries with it differ-
ent implications for the economic subjectivity of the capitalist when we examine
it alongside Ricardo’s comments on the taxation of luxuries, where choice is not
only matter of moving capital to its most productive and lucrative employment,
but is also embedded within the personal existence of the capitalist. When
Ricardo considers the choices that arise when an individual of means is faced
with heavy taxation on luxury items such as wine, he is bringing choice to the
very life-realm of the capitalist. But in order to address the categorization of
commodities (i.e. as either luxuries or necessities) he must first bind commodi-
ties to wages, and through wages, to profit.
Ricardo tells us that taxes on wages are taxes on profits, or, in other words,
that the result of taxation on either profits or wages is the same. This logic is
clear and holds steady within his general architectonic given the rate of profit.
While we already know that the effect of taxes on wages is the same as the taxes
on profits, at least insofar as it affects the capitalist subject, the effect on labour-
ing subjects is somewhat different. As opposed to the capitalist, who moves
capital, the labourer is moved by capital. There is no rational anticipation as we
saw with the capitalist, because the labourer is dependent upon necessary com-
modities for his own bodily survival, whereas the capitalist is only facing an
economic aberration, alteration or accentuation, rather than death. As Buchanan
maintains: ‘The wages of labour consist not in money, but in what money pur-
chases, namely, provisions and other necessaries; and the allowance of the
labourer out of the common stock, will always be in proportion to that supply’
(cited in Ricardo 1986, 218). Since wages do not manifest solely in terms of
liquid capital, but materialize also in commodity form, there is a material bind
that ties the worker to the logic of the alteration of wages. Only if the price of
labour did not rise with a tax on wages, which is highly unlikely given the result-
ing increase on raw produce and other necessaries, would there be no loss in
employment. But even in this scenario it is only the capitalist and the State who
would benefit, and the worker who would suffer due to an increase in the price
of his survival. Furthermore, this scenario is a logical impossibility due to the
diminishing rate of profits that would accompany a rise in wages, and given the
fact that wages are not solely bound up in monetary form. Ricardo is again quick
to point out that taxes are not generally spent productively by the State, and that
taxes occur at the expense of comfort (for our capitalist subjects) or survival (for
our labouring subjects), and tend to disrupt the natural movement of capital by
diminishing its supply or preventing efficient and productive accumulation. He
elaborates on this point by concluding that taxes
diminish the demand for labour, and therefore it is a probable, but not a
necessary, nor a peculiar consequence of a tax on wages, that those wages
would rise, they would not rise by a sum precisely equal to the tax.
(222)
Ultimately, taxation is always a burden on the subject who comes to bear it.
But the nature of the burden is drastically different depending on the commodi-
ties which it affects. We have already seen how taxation on wages means a taxa-
tion on the very life source of the labourer by potentially diminishing the amount
of commodities available that are necessary for his existence. Taxation on profits
similarly affect the labourer insofar as they reduce the pool of capital destined
for the maintenance of labour and thus reduce the demand for labour in general.
But for the capitalist the personal burden lies on his ability to enjoy luxury, to
enjoy commodities by whose purchase the reinvestment of productive capital is
in fact curtailed. The rational choice, from the point of view of capital, would
always be to deny oneself luxury in order to productively employ capital. But
Ricardo does not go so far as to say this, even though he does allude to limit-
point of expenditure on luxury. The one-dimensionality of the capitalist subject
is not total in this instance, but Ricardo’s comments on the taxation of luxuries
betray the necessary tendency in those who move capital to subsume all social
behaviour based on custom and status to the rationality of capital movement.
The general social advantage of taxation on luxuries is that they are paid, gener-
ally speaking, from an individual’s income, and do not direct supplies of national
capital. And yet this very advantage also leads to other disadvantages as it may
simply discourage consumption. In a passage that most starkly contrasts the
advantage of the capitalist with the disadvantage of the labouring subject,
Ricardo argues that:
If wine were much raised in price in consequence of taxation, it is probable

that a man would rather forego the enjoyments of wine, than make any
important encroachments on his capital, to be so enabled to purchase it. . . .
A man intent on saving, will exempt himself from a tax on wine, by giving
up the use of it. The income of the country may be undiminished, and yet
the State may be unable to raise a shilling by the tax.
(241)
But the advantage that Ricardo fails to mention, and that resides outside of the
State, is that the restriction of the consumption of luxuries will free up more
capital to be productively employed in the economy, and will help unfetter the
movement of capital. While the purchase of luxuries is not equal to hoarding, it
does represent a limited base of commodity production and consumption that
could be more efficiently replaced by the production of necessities, implements
of production, and goods for export.
The more fascinating aspect of this passage, however, resides in the ease with
which Ricardo is able to portray the ‘choice’ held by the consumer of luxuries.
The assumption that one would give up wine altogether because it is more
expensive, absurd as it might be, is the least problematic aspect of this example.
What is more problematic is the fact that Ricardo has unwittingly introduced a
customary code of frugality and pride into the discourse of commodity consump-
tion. While we can point out that there are customary codes that no doubt under-
lie consumptive behaviour, the reliance on custom is here confused with an
abeyance to the will of capital. On the one hand the capitalist, or the subject of
sufficient means, is expected to use capital productively, which should be the
initial problem in his personal consumption of wine. But the real issue, as
Ricardo puts it, is a matter of a limit-point, an arbitrary cap on the expenditure
for one’s personal luxury. Although the logic of productive reinvestment should
curtail the use of wine in the first place, at least according to Ricardo’s architec-
tonic, it is pride and frugality that ultimately intervene in the practice, and, only
if the degree of taxation is too high. Further, Ricardo particularizes this rule of
consumption among capitalist subjects themselves:
It is not because they cannot pay more, that they give up the use of wine and
horses, but because they will not pay more. Every man has some standard in
his own mind by which he estimates the value of his enjoyments, but that
standard is as various as the human character.
(241)
Unsurprisingly, the degree of personal limit, choice and the willingness to spend
can come only once one is sufficiently engaged with capital to have a choice.
Thus the mover of capital will necessarily have a connection through his actions
with the logic of capital to find himself in this situation to begin with (unlike the
worker who is subjected to the movement of capital rather than identifying with
it through action). To contrast the type of decision making, the type of choice,
that occurs here with the material needs of the worker, is crucial. In the latter
instance the labouring body is implicated in the activity of the State as he is
affected, and viscerally so, by the diminution of his wages (through the increased
price of necessaries, taxes on wages, or the disparity between the two) and
unable to take rational action as his very life is under siege and because he
effectively lacks the epistemological authority to do so. The mover of capital, on
the other hand, once again enacts a choice by determining the limit to the price
of his luxury. And on what criteria is this limit based? On the amount of capital
that he requires for productive consumption (reinvestment) according to the
logic of Ricardo’s architectonic, and on the pride of his own frugality. What is
revealed through this argumentation is a deep connection with the thought of
Adam Smith, with the explanation of taxation and economic movement based on
a nostalgic sense of custom and community. While I do not wish to claim that
individual or community action based on custom is absent from the economic
realm (quite the opposite, in fact), I do believe that it undermines the fragile
logical structure of the economy that Ricardo creates in the Principles.
There is a connection between the general economic subject found in Smith’s
Wealth of Nations, a subject premised upon the general moral tendencies out-
lined in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the epistemologically privileged
subject that Ricardo depicts as a capitalist taxpayer.33 Let us turn to the Physio-
cratic ideas behind Smith’s notion of the invisible hand and the subject natural-
ized within the capitalist economy. The work of both Quesnay and Smith shows
a development, albeit in varying degrees, in the concept of rational subjective
agency within the ‘body’ of the economy. The difficulties that Smith in particu-
lar shows these subjects to encounter when trying to enact their rational subject-
ive agency will illuminate the spurious harmony that Ricardo must precariously
maintain in order to claim an epistemologically privileged capitalist subject in
the face of the movement of capitalist distribution.
François Quesnay’s physiological economic model in the Tableau
Economique (1759) allows him to approach the naturally based economy as
something that may be understood in its entirety, diagnosed as to its illness, and
cured by its members, with the correct structural adjustments. If the economic
body is maintained under the correct regimen – a regimen that must necessarily
correspond to its material and agricultural circumstances – then it will function
to the maximum benefit and well-being of all of its members. In practical terms,
this can be achieved by facilitating the input and output flows of the net product
with government regulations that favour agriculture and divert energies from the
hoarding of wealth in commerce and manufacturing. A combination of the
rational observation of, and sympathy for, natural processes (not only of human
behaviour but also of the environmental conditions needed for cultivation and
resource gathering) provides the groundwork for benevolent social organization.
Just as we must respect the limits and needs of the body in order to think about
how to cure it, the economy must be understood through its natural necessities
and tendencies before we can apply reason to its structure.
Smith opposes Quesnay’s understanding of the economy as a body in a way
that is particularly illuminating. He hints at an unknown force in the body –
human or political – that acts regardless of the intentions of its occupant/s:
Some speculative physicians seem to have imagined that the health of the
human body could be preserved only by a certain precise regime of diet and
exercise, of which every, the smallest, violation necessarily occasioned
some degree of disease or disorder proportioned to the degree of the viola-
tion. Experience, however, would seem to show that the human body fre-
quently preserves, to all appearance at least, the perfect state of health under
a vast variety of different regimens; even under some which are generally
believed to be very far from being perfectly wholesome. But the healthful
state of the human body, it would seem, contains in itself some unknown
principle of preservation, capable either of preventing or of correcting, in
many respects, the bad effects even of a very faulty regimen.
(1976, 730)
In the same way that there exists in the human body an unknowable principle of
preservation, so too in political economy, Smith argues, is there an unknown
element that cannot be precisely located. This makes it impossible to actively
and knowingly prevent a diseased economy or encourage a prosperous state. In
effect, Smith creates a split between the knowing physician (or political econo-
mist), and the body which he studies. This split is not reconcilable by any phys-
ical law or physiological analysis, but is rather amplified by the natural instincts
of man towards selfishness and vanity, and the invisible, almost unknowable
hand that guides the economy. The way in which we behave may to Smith
appear to be natural, but the organization of the economy can neither be based
upon the Natural Right of the Physiocrats,34 nor controlled in a necessarily posit-
ive manner by the conscious collective actions of its individual members. In part
this lack of concern for the power of the political economist and the agency of
economic subjects shapes The Wealth of Nations. The pre-architectonic form is
not inherently bound up in positing the clear authority of the economist through
a coherent set of principles nor through a consistent set of subjects. This
explains, to a certain extent, not only the difference between Smith and the work
of the Physiocrats, but the difference between Smith and economic thought from
Ricardo onwards.
Smith’s ideas about the nature of the subjectivity of economic agents appear
most explicitly in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and these ideas inform his
understanding of economic logic and structure as much as Ricardo’s understand-
ing of distinct economic subjects allows him to create structural differentiations
within his architectonic. Smith defines human beings as individuals with very
solitary and solipsistic desires. He naturalizes qualities such as ambition and the
quest for wealth by proposing that they relate to the universal human desire to
appear noble in the eyes of others and to avoid the outward display of pain or
poverty, which would require the sympathy of others. This theory is based on
the idea that it is difficult to genuinely sympathize with the pain of others
because we can have no sense of the pains that other bodies endure, nor respect
those who have fallen from riches, or those who are too miserable to acquire
them in the first place. In such a way, this theoretical standpoint is reminiscent of
Hobbes’ empiricism where human action is based on the pursuit of love and the
avoidance of pain. Smith explains that:
[I]t is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our
joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches and conceal our
poverty. Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to expose our distress to
the view of the public, and to feel, that though our situation is open to the
eyes of all mankind, no mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer.
Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind that we
pursue riches and avoid poverty.
(1976, 50)
This explanation of the relationship between natural sentimental reactions and

the pursuit of wealth is subsequently reconciled at several junctures within The
Wealth of Nations with a cooperative and diversified (in terms of the division of
labour) population. The unknowability of the hand that brings harmony to a nat-
urally selfish mixture of potentially adversarial individuals, takes the theological
force of Quesnay’s Natural Right and mystifies a supposedly natural subset of
the economy in almost rational terms. The distinction between domestic and
external economies (similar to what we will see in Ricardo’s exposition of the
relationship between taxation and the channels of trade) appears to help drive the
cooperative blend of mutually beneficial self-interested agents. Further, the
natural individual preference for domestic industry lends the validation of pro-
tectionism to the motivation to cooperate economically:
By preferring the support of the domestic to that of foreign industry, he

intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a
manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own
gain, and he in this, as in many other cases led an invisible hand to promote
an end which was no part of his intention.
(2000, 484–5)
But the real weight of Smith’s reconciliation of individually selfish motiva-

tions with spontaneous and cooperative economic organization lies in the natural
human tendency to better living conditions, in the specialization of labour, and
in the subsequent systematization of capital accumulation. The natural drive to
improve our quality of life explains for Smith how self-interested economic
activity can represent the interest of the many; what is a detriment to the rest of
the community cannot result in a long-term benefit to the individual. But this
explanation is not truly convincing without the explicit understanding that the
economic system is complex and interconnected, albeit in a manner far less
coherent than shown by Ricardo’s architectonic. In this sense Smith is postulat-
ing the correspondence between self-interest and collective good in terms of a
specifically capitalist economic context in which perfectly free competition
structures relationships. Because the human tendencies to act in one’s own self-
interest, to truck and barter, and to spontaneously cooperate are inherent, it is
the structure of the economy around the individual that really matters. Joseph
Spengler explains,
on the one hand [Smith] holds in effect that the impetus to individually
beneficial behaviour flows from the propensities inherent in individuals,
from the inclination of man to truck and barter and from the desire of each
to better his condition. On the other hand, how effective and how generally
salutary are the results flowing immediately and ultimately from the pursuit
of this desire depends upon the nature of the socio-economic system within
which the pursuit is carried on. Moreover, Smith implied, systems varied in
greater measure than did the desire of the representative individual to better
himself.
(1975, 396)
At the same time that the economic context is more important than the intention
of the individual, the individual has innate characteristics that promote the for-
mation and development of that very economy. In other words, the division of
labour that forms the basis of Smith’s explanation of the capitalist system stems
from the industrious tendency to truck and barter. This double-sided, almost
contradictory causal relation between human nature and the economic system,
will force us, in the next chapter, to consider whether Smith’s claims about the
economy are driven by naturalism or rationalist empiricism. Smith confuses this
matter further by refusing to contemplate the origin of social diversification in
The Wealth of Nations:
whether this propensity [to truck and barter] be one of those original princi-
ples in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether,
as seems more probable it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of
reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire.
(14)
While we cannot know if the capacity to work energetically to better one’s con-
dition is an immutable aspect of human nature, we do know that Smith harbours
the suspicion that reasoning and planning (if only informally and within the con-
dition of ‘perfect liberty’) draw out and enhance these tendencies. What remains
constant for Smith regardless of our potentially natural industriousness or the
power of economic reasoning, is the natural drive toward individual self-interest
and personal gain.
We already know that Ricardo makes the claim that both the individual capi-
talist, along with the political economist, have agency within the economy
insofar as they are able to reason and make choices that coincide with the natu-
ralized logic of distribution. What now also becomes apparent is that their
agency is always already curtailed by the logic of the capital that they might
move. We have seen on an individual level how Ricardo’s capitalist subjects will
move and control their capital in the interest of increasing (or maintaining) a
certain rate of accumulation, and that this rate of accumulation is determined by
a declining rate of profits. Further, we have seen how the individual is so bound
up in economic rationalism that he will alter personal habits such as drinking
wine in order to avoid excessive expenditure, though this choice while appar-
ently rational is in fact rooted in qualities similar to those Smith depicted in his
Theory of Moral Sentiments – that of pride, vanity, or the desire to maintain
outward appearances.
But the example that we have seen in Smith, where the self-interested indi-
vidual’s choices about the movement of his particular capital coincide with the
general good through an almost unknowable healing mechanism in the economic
body, also resides in Ricardo’s explanation of the link between individual (assur-
edly but not explicitly capitalist) and the nation. In his discussion of the effects
that the repayment of national debt might have through increased rates of taxa-
tion we see that:
A country which has accumulated a large debt, is placed in a most artificial

situation; and although the amount of taxes, and the increased price of
labour, may not, and I believe does not, place it under any other disadvan-
tage with respect to foreign countries, except the unavoidable one of paying
those taxes, yet it becomes the interest of every contributor to withdraw his
shoulder from the burthen, and to shift this payment from himself to
another; and the temptation to remove himself and his capital to another
country where he will be exempted from such burthens, becomes at last irre-
sistible, and overcomes the natural reluctance which every man feels to quit
the place of his birth, and the scene of his early associations. A country
which has involved itself in the difficulties attending this artificial system,
would act wisely by ransoming itself from them, at the sacrifice of any
portion of its property which might be necessary to redeem its debt. That
which is wise in an individual is wise also in a nation.
(247–8, emphasis added)
Taxation, as a remedy for national debt, imposes an economic artificiality upon a

nation, forces the movers of capital to operate in a way that is not natural to
either their sentimental attachments, nor to the patterns of domestic distribution
that accompany them. When Smith explains that ‘by preferring the support of
the domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security’ (2000,
484–5) we see the emergence of a sentimental and custom-oriented subject, one
that is mirrored in Ricardo’s work. The particular reference to the natural
r eluctance of quitting the ‘scene of his early associations’ betrays the customary
morality, the world of social appearances mediated through instrumental rela-
tions, of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Finally, the individual and the
nation are pitted against the evils of taxation insofar as taxation presents a barrier
to the smooth movement of distribution within Ricardo’s architectonic.
The contradiction that strikes at the core of the mover of capital, this intellectual
subject with wisdom tantamount to the abstraction of a nation, is that the pang of
custom, the call of pride and vanity, will interfere with his subjective simultaneity
with the laws of capital. Just as the labouring body could not remain an embodied
material ground within the idealist architectonic that contains the economy, the
mover of capital cannot remain the rational agent of capital without also being sol-
ipsistic, nostalgic and sentimentalist. We see that sentimentalism may appear to be
easily trumped in the last instance by the logic of productive consumption – ‘but
assuredly there are limits to the price, which in the form of perpetual taxation, indi-
viduals will submit to pay for the privilege of merely living in their native country’
(249) – but it is also the customary mode of relating economically that enters, in
Ricardo’s own account, to the natural tendencies that privilege nation and acquaint-
ances over a pure logic of accumulation.
Conclusions
We are left at the end of Ricardo’s work with three distinct economic subjects.
We have witnessed their constitution and development within the inner structure
of Ricardo’s architectonic. And despite the faulty and spurious nature of this
architectonic, all three subjects – the labourer, mover of capital and the political
economist – are necessary to the structure of the rational and naturalized theory
of the economy that Ricardo has created. The labouring body, the worker, is the
ground of Ricardo’s theory. But this body is forgotten, denied any epistemologi-
cal authority, subsumed into the material realm on top of which the laws of dis-
tribution operate. The labourer is robbed of his materiality, made abstract and
bound into reified relations, i.e. relationships characterized by price, by units of
labour-time, etc. The capitalist, or mover of capital, aligns himself with the laws
of distribution that spring from this forgotten material source of value. He thus
holds epistemological privilege insofar as his knowledge is the knowledge of
capital, of profit, of price, or, of the very movement of the economy itself. The
rational laws of distribution that the political economist describes are thus the
laws that give shape and order to the architectonic. In order to maintain coher-
ence, we have seen how Ricardo was forced to proceed as if he had found his
invariable standard, his expression of quantification and reification outside of the
realm of contingency, labour and the materiality of life. We see how the subject-
ivity of the political economist becomes bound to the logical coherence and con-
sistence of his system, and to the clear and rational containment of the subjects
that he houses within its confines.
A fundamental question arises from this point of conclusion: How, and in
what capacity, will these subjects reappear in post-Ricardian economic thought?
This question is crucial in economic models that attempt to recreate a coherent
understanding of industrial (and post-industrial) capitalism, because the role of
the political economist will always be at stake within the architectonic form,
which inevitably attempts to capture more than falls within the confines of a
strictly logical system. Beyond the political economist, in his most overt theoret-
ical and methodological movements, we must explore the ways in which the dif-
ferentiation between agents of the economy, be they labourers or capitalists, are
established in epistemological terms, or the way that abstract and undifferenti-
ated ‘rational economic men’ take precedence in the architectures of economic
thought.
First we will see that the real effects of the Ricardian architectonic and of the
subjectivities effected within its house can be gauged by a return, as we have
already begun in our discussion of taxation, to Adam Smith’s work. For in The
Wealth of Nations we will witness precisely that which is not yet coherent, not
yet concrete, and not yet subjectively contained in Smith’s thought. Once this
distinction is solidified, the relationship between the abstract ‘knowing’ subject
and capital will show itself as the fundamental characteristic of the architectonic
form. If we intend to further question the hierarchical structure of epistemologi-
cally constituted economic subjectivity, then we must question not only the
nature of epistemology itself as it is employed in the construction of economic
architectonics, but the various ways in which it has been deployed in the Mar-
ginalist, Keynesian and Austrian traditions. In each of the architectonics subse-
quently addressed in this study, we will see the traces of the problematic as it
was fundamentally set by Ricardo’s revolutionary text. Even when the econo-
mists we address explicitly reject certain Ricardian principles, they nonetheless
re-enact Ricardo’s dream as a political economist – to create, explain and predict
the economic world within a contained and logical structure of thought.

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1

Prefacing political economy: the rationalization of the

in different stages of society, the proportion of the whole produce of the

This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in

Value and method

Ricardo’s method is as follows: He begins with the determination of the

The embodiment of labour, as Ricardo establishes in his labour theory of value,

Let those discourses, therefore, which we have so often talked about, be

on the one hand he attempted to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois

the developed categories of political economy, are confronted with their

where it does not consist of monotonous formal application of the same

Ricardo’s principles: the embodied ground of the

The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for

This principle exists as a rebuttal to Smith’s understanding of the relationship

Estimation is a particularly interesting concept here, because it echoes (as

We may fairly conclude, that whatever inequality there might originally

The stable and predictable character of economic movement, of course, is the

exchange value of commodities produced would be in proportion to the

it must be regarded as a great merit that Ricardo associates the differences

In Ricardo’s following principles there is an understanding of the cycles or

On account then of the different degrees of durability of their capitals, or,

This new invocation of time within distribution allows Ricardo to establish

Although the invariable measure of value is both conspicuously present and

Foucault’s point about pre-­classical economic conceptions of wealth is crucial;

If, then, I may suppose myself to be possessed of a standard so nearly

Here Ricardo writes in a manner that is uncharacteristically frank. In an obvious

Taxation and the subjects of capital

It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed,

The labourer, once he escapes the naturalized movement of capital, even if it is

If wine were much raised in price in consequence of taxation, it is probable

This explanation of the relationship between natural sentimental reactions and

By preferring the support of the domestic to that of foreign industry, he

But the real weight of Smith’s reconciliation of individually selfish motiva-

A country which has accumulated a large debt, is placed in a most artificial

Taxation, as a remedy for national debt, imposes an economic artificiality upon a

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Foucault’s point about pre-classical economic conceptions of wealth is crucial;