Ryan D Walter

I am developing an alternative history of economic thought that by-passes the usual dead-ends of "mercantilism" and "classical political economy" in favour of connecting political economy with the "history of theory". The first step involves studying the ethoi and arts of reasoning that political economists were obliged to defend in early nineteenth-century Britain in response to widespread hostility to the very idea of their science, which was often treated as a form of philosophical enthusiasm. These defences were successful in the short and long run: the Bullion Controversy, and debates over the Corn Laws and Poor Laws, saw major victories for these self-styled "theorists" in reforming the British state, a process that seems to have continued through to Keynesianism, monetarism, and beyond. Provisional results have recently been published in Modern Intellectual History as "The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo", in Intellectual History Review as "The Bullion Controversy and the History of Political Thought", and in Journal of the History of Ideas as "Defending Political Theory After Burke".

The long-range hypothesis to test in future work is that the manner in which political economy emerged as a science in the nineteenth century - beholden to theological and political programs - made it exceedingly difficult to stabilise the office of the economist, hence the ongoing conflict over this persona today.