Many historians of economic analysis have been preoccupied with locating Ricardo's work within an intellectual tradition. In recent times, the debate surrounding Ricardo's ‘placement’ has centred on the question of whether he belongs with the ‘neoclassical’ or, alternatively, with the ‘Sraffians’. This chapter focuses on the main interpretative issues involved in this ongoing debate. The sections deal, in turn, with the question of whether Ricardo could be said to have anticipated significant elements of a ‘subjective’ theory of consumer demand; his position on the influence of demand, more broadly conceived; the role accorded by him to the forces of ‘supply-and-demand’ in price determination; his view of factor pricing and, more specifically, the question of whether he belongs within a Say–Walras tradition of analysis; the affinity of his work to forms of general equilibrium analysis; and, finally, the question of his alleged ‘Sraffian’ connections. My concluding remarks are reserved to the final chapter.

UTILITY

The familiar exercise of ‘going behind’ demand schedules to a model of consumer choice no longer necessitates any mention of ‘utility’ but, however performed, the object is to construct a framework within which an individual's consumption tastes may be formally represented, subject to certain imposed criteria of logical consistency. Having developed the model, the next step is usually to consider the properties of a consumption equilibrium, chief of which is, in the normal two good case (disregarding ‘corner solutions’), the equality between the (given) relative price ratio and the individual's (subjective) marginal rate of substitution between the goods.