Description:David Ricardo was the leading political economist of the early nineteenth century, and his ideas have been controversial and influential ever since. This book sets out to reconstruct the detailed substance and evolution of Ricardo's thought on the central topics of value, distribution and accumulation, and to summarize and evaluate the debates that continue to rage over the interpretation of his writings. It differs from other books on the subject by presenting Ricardo's work in its own terms, not those imported from a later theoretical discourse.