The light that failed

Peter Clarke

• The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 by Maxine Berg
  Cambridge, 379 pp, £16.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 521 22782 8
• Masters, Unions and Men by Richard Price
  Cambridge, 355 pp, £18.50, June 1980, ISBN 0 521 22882 4
• Work, Society and Politics by Patrick Joyce
  Harvester, 356 pp, £24.00, July 1980, ISBN 0 85527 680 0

There is sometimes rather a fine distinction between a paradox and a fallacy. It has often been remarked upon as a paradox that, in the great age of British expansion during the Industrial Revolution, the classical economists, especially Ricardo, should have taken such a dim view of the prospects for economic growth. But what if it can be demonstrated that this is a misreading of what Ricardo meant about the natural progression towards a stationary state? Such a revision is, in fact, one achievement of Maxine Berg’s exemplary study. By putting Ricardo’s contentions in context she offers a truly historical account of his thought, which shows that his model of ‘natural tendencies’ was a counterfactual or limiting case, intended precisely to identify the avenues of escape. One way out was via foreign trade. The other was via technical change.