David Ricardo had a rich and varied career. He was a successful broker on the London Stock Exchange, an M.P. in the House of Commons, and one of the most highly respected political economists of the nineteenth century. It is chiefly due to his reputation as a political economist, however, that Ricardo is remembered today.

The significance of David Ricardo for the discipline of economics still remains a hotly debated topic more than 165 years after his death. A scholarly consensus concerning the validity of his economic analyses has never emerged. There has never even been a scholarly consensus concerning the correct interpretation of Ricardian economics. As one recent commentator, Mark Blaug, has put it: "On every question, there were at least two, if not three, Ricardo's." Nor is Ricardo's controversiality limited to his theories of capitalist economics. As Blaug says, "that most bourgeois of all bourgeois economists...