Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/496



the development of the mental sciences exegesis has frequently played an important part. A change of doctrine has been justified, or supported, or commended for general acceptance, by a new interpretation of an authoritative text. Sir Henry Maine has explained the nature of this process in the history of Roman Law:—

We are all of us able to supply examples for ourselves of a similar procedure in theology.

There are not wanting indications that something of the same kind is now taking place in English Political Economy with reference to Ricardo. It is a comparatively recent and an almost exclusively English phenomenon. To say nothing of the historical economists, the re-creator of abstract economics in England, Stanley Jevons, did not hesitate twelve years ago to describe Ricardo as an 'able but wrong-headed man,' who had 'shunted the car of economic science on to a wrong line'; while, within the last few months, the spokesman of the new Austrian abstract school has declared, without any words of qualification, that