David Ricardo

Independent activity Liberalism and republicanism 1772–1823 ○ Illness

Classical political economist whose Principles set out the labour theory of value, the theory of rent and comparative advantage

Born in London in 1772, the son of a stockbroker from a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin, he went to work with his father at fourteen. Marrying a Quaker and turning Unitarian estranged him from his family; he made a fortune financing government borrowing and retired to Gloucestershire. His Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) refined Adam Smith's labour theory of value, holding that a commodity's value depends on the labour needed to produce it, and set out theories of rent, wages and profits and the principle of comparative advantage. In Parliament from 1819 he backed free trade and parliamentary reform and opposed the Corn Laws; he died in 1823. Early socialists of the 1820s read radical implications into his value theory, and in Capital Marx carried the labour theory of value into an analysis of exploitation.