The Vocabulary of Theory and Practice in the Bullion Controversy, 1797–1811

This chapter uses the Bullion Controversy to test the hypothesis articulated at the close of the previous chapter—that Malthus and Ricardo did not use the notions of method and model in their work but rather tended to think in terms of theory and practice. The debate over the Bank of England does indeed represent confirming evidence for Malthus’s and Ricardo’s use of the vocabulary of theory and practice. Moreover, the episode shows that Ricardo was porous to his argumentative context, deploying Ancient Constitution style rhetoric to legitimize his attacks on an august Whig institution. For his part, Malthus also used this vocabulary while registering some doubts over Ricardo’s intellectual performance as a theorist, a title to which Malthus also laid claim.