Introduction to Ricardo - The New View (1995)
When approached by a publishing house to preface a collection of articles and papers by an autobiographical introduction, it is difficult not to imagine the sound of fluttering wings, harps and such like. Since I am feeling in reasonably good health and wish to speculate a little further on the manner in which the fallibility and subjectivity of the historian might affect – who knows, perhaps even improve – his work, I shall take the risk and postpone a full-fledged confession to a later volume in this series of Collected Essays, limiting myself here to the minimum required to provide the present selection with an appropriate background.
Those familiar with Dr Donald Trefusis, Regius Professor of Philology at the University of Cambridge and Extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew's College, may recall that in one version of his obituary – College members traditionally write their own obituaries to 'save ... family and friends the pain and embarrassment of having to make up lies themselves' – he wrote of himself that 'he was as reviled, scorned and despised as any pure academic' (Fry 1993, 43-4). I am able to claim that my work on David Ricardo and the classical economists has attracted reactions that would make Trefusis green with envy – 'bizarre', 'fantastic', 'ludicrous', even 'tragic', are only some of the friendlier examples. Trefusis might have been inclined to cite Milton on my behalf: 'Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.' He could say that; I could not possibly comment.
Of course no one is perfect. I have to admit to very strong support indeed from other quarters, even some 'conversions'. To give the flavour of the extraordinarily disparate opinions I cannot do better than cite two polar extreme evaluations, each involving a Decalogue. The first is by Professor Mark Blaug in his celebrated Economic Theory in Retrospect:
I have left to the last the most recent and the most exhaustive study of the Ricardian model and Ricardo's views on just about everything: S. Hollander, The Economics of David Ricardo (1979). This massive book is nothing less than a full-scale frontal attack on the entire body of Ricardian scholarship, arguing that absolutely everybody else has more or less misinterpreted Ricardo. Consider just some of the iconoclastic themes of Hollander's opus: (1) Ricardo's method of analysis was identical to that of Adam Smith; (2) Ricardo's work was basically in the tradition of general equilibrium analysis that runs from Smith to Walras to modern days and, in particular, Ricardo treated pricing and distribution as interdependent; (3) Ricardo's profit theory did not originate in a concern over the Corn Laws and Ricardo never believed, even in his earlier writings, that profits in agriculture determine the general rate of profit in the economy; (4) Ricardo's value theory was essentially the same as that of Marshall in that it paid as much attention to demand as to supply, and Ricardo never regarded the invariable measure of value as an important element in his theory; (5) Ricardo could have established his fundamental theorem that 'profits vary inversely with wages' without his invariable yardstick and frequently took the short-cut of assuming identical capital-labour ratios in all industries to give him the answers he looked for; (6) wages in Ricardo are never conceived as constant or fixed at subsistence levels; (7) Ricardo never assumed a zero price-elasticity of demand for corn, in effect making the demand for agricultural produce a simple function of the size of the population; (8) Ricardo was not a quantity theorist in the conventional sense, nor a rigid Bullionist, nor did he hold a monetary theory that was very different from that of Adam Smith; (9) Ricardo did not predict a rising rental share, nor did he ever commit himself to any clear-cut predictions about any economic variable, least of all the rate of profit; and (10) Ricardo was never seriously concerned about the possibility of class conflict between landowners, on the one hand, and workers and capitalists, on the other. I believe that every one of these ten assertions is false but readers will have to consult the book and to make up their own minds.
(Blaug 1985, 147)
I actually go a long way with Professor Blaug. Many of the assertions (especially those containing 'never' or the equivalent) are false. But these I do not recognize as my own, claiming for myself and attributing to Ricardo a modicum of subtlety and sophistication. A fairer Decalogue – we may have proof here for Manicheism – is by Professor Martin Bronfenbrenner in a review of my Classical Economics (1985, 1992) in which Ricardo figures large. This version has the merit of defining the context of my work with great clarity, saving me considerable effort:
The challenge of Hollander is on two fronts at once, which is to say, that it is directed against two categories of more or less complacent opponents: conventional marginalists to his political Right as well as ... Italo-Cambridge Neo‑Keynesians to his political Left. Let me summarize in a decalogue of propositions his principal challenges to conventional marginalism, in which the present generation of economists (including the present writer) was largely taught, and largely trained to consider classical economics outmoded in the fashion of Grandma's hoop skirt and Grandpa's stovepipe hat:
1. The classical economists did not ignore the influence of demand on value and price, either of inputs or of outputs, either in the short or the long run. Rather, their entire analysis was a development of supply and demand, seen as functional relationships and not as fixed quantities.
2. The classical economists did not accept either a subsistence 'iron law' or a wage-fund theory of wage rates.
3. Nor did they maintain that the distribution of income would necessarily shift in favour of the landlord class as a consequence of economic progress, whether or not such progress eventuated in a stationary state.
4. The classical economists had vague, unformed general equilibrium systems in mind, as products of supply and demand functions for both inputs and outputs.
5. Turning to macroeconomics: The classical economists espoused neither a mechanical form of the quantity theory of money nor Say's Law in the 'Identity' sense which does not specify any equilibrium price level.
6. The classical economists were not 'savage deflationists.' Given a wartime fiat-money inflation to which the economy had largely adjusted, restoration of a metallic standard should not have required return to the prewar prices of the precious metals.
7. The classical method of economic analysis is better described as an interaction and reinforcement between inductive and deductive methods than as pure deduction derived solely from introspection – Schumpeter's 'Ricardian vice.' Their use of historical examples was more than window-dressing, and they sometimes went out of their way to consider apparent paradoxes and anomalies. (Ricardo's 'misdemeanor,' falling short of 'vice', was to include so few historical illustrations in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. He included them plentifully in his other writings.)
8. In view of (1-7) above, the 'marginal revolution' of the 1870s was not in fact a revolution at all, but 'nothing more than a change in "concentration of attention."'
9. Rather than a combinatory reconciliation of classical and marginalist conceptions, Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics should be looked upon as a modernized restatement of classical economics – the economics of Ricardo, in particular.
10. Rather than 'It's all in Marshall' – battle-cry of the pre-Keynesian 'old fogeys' – they should have insisted that 'It's all in Ricardo,' meaning by 'Ricardo' his essays on policy problems along with his Principles.
Professor Hollander has convinced me that a set of propositions much like the above decalogue – if not that decalogue as it stands – is basically correct.
(Bronfenbrenner 1989, 36-8)
As will be clear from the Tablets cited above, a major theme running through The Economics of David Ricardo and Classical Economics – it is true of the essays reprinted here – is my contention that Ricardo's economics constitutes – in its fundamentals, not merely tangentially or in some inconsequential way – the economics of allocation involving the information conveying and signalling role of prices, the notion of alternative costs, the principle of maximizing net returns and the market interaction of goods and services – in brief, the theory of the coordination of decentralized economic activities. This is what I refer to by the designation 'general equilibrium' in the Ricardo context. It is an unfortunate term if it conjures up Arrow, Debreu or Hahn; but I had presumed it would be self-evident that this was not my intention. I have also made it clear throughout that Ricardo's main objective was not that of Walras, but rather to demonstrate the inverse wage-profit relation.[i] There were, moreover, contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Ricardo who developed aspects of 'general equilibrium' not clear to Ricardo himself – Longfield, in particular.[ii] I have never claimed that Ricardo said the last word.
There is a second theme – strictly it is this that seems to be usually intended by the designation 'New View' – namely, that the process of growth subject to land scarcity entails a necessarily downward trend in both the real (commodity) wage and the profit rate, the incidence of increasing land scarcity being shared between labour and capital in a ratio depending on capital-supply and labour-supply conditions. These are not independent exercises. To express the latter in value terms, and demonstrate the necessary rise in the proportionate share of the value of the product going to labour despite the fall in the real wage, necessitated a preliminary investigation of value theory.
The allocation dimension implies that there was no paradigmatic or 'revolutionary' break between Smithian and Ricardian theory, and also none in the early 1870s with the work of the so-called 'marginalist revolutionaries'. (This is sometimes referred to as the 'Continuity Thesis'.) The growth dimension implies the undermining of the notion of profit as 'surplus'. Let me make myself perfectly clear. (1) I do not deny a concern with the source of investible funds – the disposable surplus; but that might be found in all incomes, wages included. Thus with decreased land scarcity – 'an added tract of fertile land' – real income and part of the disposable surplus would be transferred to labour and capital. (2) Profits could not be reduced, as by taxation, without an impact on the rate of accumulation, and, accordingly, could not be represented entirely as surplus in the sense of 'economic rent'. In the context of the inverse profit-wage relation, both incomes are exactly on a par since the real wage is not a datum and governs the population growth rate, just as the profit rate governs that of capital. My Ricardo and Classical Economics contain much else including disquisitions on policy, money and banking and method; but it would be fair to say that the foregoing résumé covers the themes that have attracted most attention. (Rather a pity.) These themes are developed and defended in Sections III and IV.
Professor Bronfenbrenner closes his review by asking:
Is the Hollander rehabilitation of classical economics a success? I think that it is, both in presenting what classical economics was and in stressing how much of it remains in both modern Micro- and modern Macro-economics. It represents an advance over, say, Mark Blaug's Ricardian Economics (New Haven, 1958) and Thomas Sowell's Classical Economics Reconsidered (Princeton, 1974) primarily in its superior treatment of the ‘Cambridge critique.’ It is too much to hope for this volume the status of last word on classical economics, but it surely defines a new orthodoxy and becomes the next target – not to be confused with a sitting duck – for dissidents to attack (Bronfenbrenner 1989, 41).
He has been proven correct in his forecast. One 'Sraffian' reviewer of Classical Economics described it as 'a tragic book. It shows a reluctance on Hollander's part to benefit from the criticism his earlier work so abundantly received' (Groenewegen 1988, 89). This, of course, is academese for my unwillingness to abandon my position in favour of the reviewer's. I leave it to Professor Blaug to come to my defence. He makes the point that 'Sam Hollander is notorious for writing rejoinders to every adverse review of one of his books' (Blaug 1987a, 19). Precisely. Some authors maintain a dignified silence in the face of criticism especially since – as Stigler has observed – scholars 'seldom change their minds' (1988, 210). For better or for worse, I have chosen a different line. I have listened carefully to the criticisms, found them wanting and given my reasons for standing firm. This will become clear not only in Section II which includes formal replies to critics of my Ricardo but throughout, since many of the papers entail responses. Nor can one be absolutely sure that there will be no converts; there is some evidence of weakening even on the part of my severest critics (see Chapter 17).[iii] It is also my hope that students will benefit from observing, or at least be amused by, the antics of the contending parties.
A particularly serious matter is raised by Professor Bronfenbrenner. If my position is correct, as he believes it is, 'how ... could so much eminent and honest scholarship have gone so awry over the generations which separated modern from classical economics? How could so many great men in so many countries have so badly confused first approximation and "pedagogic clarities" with wrong-headedness, one-sidedness, narrow-mindedness, and sheer stupidity?' (1989, 38). I shall try to give a (partial) answer to that question presently, pointing out now that, pace Blaug's rhetorical assertion that, in my view, 'absolutely everybody else has more or less misinterpreted Ricardo', I have in fact done my best to give credit where credit is due for all or part of the so-called New View.[iv] And the fact that Professor Morishima (1989) reaches much the same perspective on Ricardo as I do, though by a very different path, provides a most pleasing corroboration.
I also find my position confirmed and reinforced by my researches for The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (in press). There I show (1) that the simultaneous decline in wage and profit rates was adopted by Ricardo before Malthus took it up; (2) that Malthus took up the corn-profit model that figures so large in Section I of this selection, and developed a price theory that is compatible with Sraffa's in his Production of Commodities (1960); (3) that Ricardo insisted against Malthus on treating corn precisely as any other product in terms of independent demand and supply functions; and (4) that Ricardo rejected the superior productivity attributed by Malthus to agriculture, a physiocratic concept appearing in The Wealth of Nations side by side with – from Ricardo's perspective – a valid body of allocation theory.[v] I shall not spell out here the potentially radical implications for one's perspective on the development of nineteenth-century economics.
As George Stigler put it so disarmingly in his memoirs: 'One surprising feature taught by intellectual history is the persistence of uncertainty over what a person really meant. One might think that intellectual competence and goodwill are all that are required to understand what a scholar intends to say, but the study of any important scholar of the past will show that belief to be most naive' (1988, 216). Here Stigler apparently takes for granted that our concern should be with 'what a scholar intends to say' though elsewhere he relegates this to a secondary category of 'personal' rather than 'scientific exegesis' (below, Chapter 15). I wholeheartedly share this objective, and would regret the infiltration of 'literary theory' of the deconstructionist variety into our discipline. It is the rejection of 'authorial intent' as a valid concern which I cannot appreciate, though fortunately self-declared literary theorists do not always practise what they preach. (I certainly do not mean by all this that one should ignore matters of style and 'rhetoric'; on the contrary, these can provide the clue to the author's intentions.)
This leads me back to Professor Bronfenbrenner's question – if my position on Ricardo is correct, how to explain honest misreadings? It is not, I would say, strictly a matter of misunderstanding that has emerged 'over the generations which separated modern from classical economics.' Ricardo was misunderstood from the outset and himself vigorously protested at some of the worst cases, at one point uncharacteristically exclaiming against Malthus: 'This is disingenuous.' If Ricardo himself had problems making himself understood to his own friends, any later commentator is going to have his work cut out to get things straight.
I illustrate from Malthus's reading of Ricardo on profits: 'to attempt to estimate the rate of profits in any country by a reference to this cause alone [diminishing agricultural returns], for ten, twenty, or even fifty years together, that is for periods of sufficient length to produce the most important effects on national prosperity, would inevitably lead to the greatest practical errors. Yet notwithstanding the utter inadequacy of this single cause to account for existing phenomena, Mr. Ricardo in his very ingenious chapter on profits, has dwelt on no other' (1820, 308); or again, the facts were 'diametrically opposed to the theory of profits founded on the natural quality of the last land taken into cultivation' (320). Ricardo protested: 'Mr. Malthus here brings a charge against me which he would find it very difficult to prove. He has himself Page 294 Section I of this Chapter stated his causes for the fall of profits' – agricultural productivity and variable corn wages. 'I fully concur with him in thinking that profits never vary but from one or other of those causes' (1951, II, 264). As for the second formulation, he could scarcely contain himself:
This is disingenuous. Who has advanced a ‘theory of profits founded on the natural quality of the last land taken into cultivation.’ The theory is that profits depend on the productiveness of the last land taken into cultivation, whether that productiveness be owing to the natural quality of the land, or the economy and skill with which labour may be applied to it. Profits are increased, either by diminishing the quantity of labour bestowed on the last land which yields a given produce, or by increasing the produce with a given quantity of labour. Mr. Malthus will I am sure not say that I have ever denied this principle – he will not say that I have not distinctly advanced it (276-7).
A second instance of 'misrepresentation' relates to value theory: '[W]hen you reject the consideration of demand and supply in the price of commodities and refer only to the means of supply, you appear to me to look only at the half of your subject. No wealth can exist unless the demand, or the estimation in which the commodity is held exceeds the cost of production: and with regard to a vast mass of commodities does not the demand actually determine the cost?' (Malthus to Ricardo, 26 October 1820; in Ricardo 1951, VIII, 285). Ricardo immediately protested: 'I have never disputed this' (24 November; 302). And again he explained his position, in this case the weight placed on production costs as the determinant of supply conditions in the face of changes in demand: 'I do not dispute either the influence of demand on the price of corn and on the price of other things, but supply follows close on its heels, and soon takes the power of regulating price in his own hands, and in regulating it he is determined by cost of production. I acknowledge the intervals on which you so exclusively dwell, but still they are only intervals.' All this was in line with his Principles, where Ricardo had spelled out the process of long-run cost determination of the corn price assuming increases of demand in the face both of constant-cost and increasing-cost conditions (1951, I, 163).[vi]
Part of the blame for the propensity to misunderstand Ricardo reflects the linguistic complexity, though I find that one quickly becomes accustomed to Ricardo's specialized terminology and learns to translate. A focus on his strong cases – including forms of expression designed to convey the 'primacy' of supply in value formation (see Chapter 12) – explains some of the error, though again I find the Principles itself to be clear on the main lines of my interpretation with respect to allocation and growth and the interdependency between them. As Jacob Viner put it, a concentration on the long-run and a tendency to omit 'explicit mention of qualifications whose validity he was prepared to acknowledge' enabled critics 'to expose him to rebuttal often more damaging in appearance than in fact' (1937, 140).[vii] All this is further compounded by a tendency to take the strong statements out of context, encouraging a confusion between 'rational' and 'historical' reconstruction.
There is also the matter of technical error. For example, at one point in a recent account of Ricardo on policy, Mark Blaug attempts an ecumenical exercise suggesting that while Pasinetti – who develops the constant subsistence-wage growth interpretation:
is unable to account for those passages in which Ricardo more or less clearly says that real wages, expressed in terms of a basket of physical commodities, can fall alongside the falling rate of profit well before the economy has reached the stationary state ... even the "new" view has difficulty in making sense of passages in which Ricardo declares unambiguously that the rate of profit depends only on the cost of producing wage goods, and on nothing else; such passages are easy to interpret, however, if we stick with the Pasinetti version of Ricardo ... It is not possible, therefore, to square everything that Ricardo said with any totally consistent formulation of the entire Ricardian system' (1987b, 121).
Here Blaug repeats a perennial error. The New View can and does accommodate Ricardo's 'unambiguous' statement, since the falling real wage is part and parcel of that same process which drives down the profit rate, and the profit rate falls precisely because the cost of producing the basket necessarily rises albeit that the magnitude of the basket declines. Blaug is not alone. Even Stigler was not immune (see Chapters 15, 16). It was Ricardo, as mentioned already, who taught Malthus that the falling real wage cannot prevent the fall in the profit rate, but the lesson has not yet been absorbed.
Misinterpretation of Ricardo has, I believe, also been compounded by a presumption that, to avoid anachronistic readings, the researcher must pretend to lack knowledge of the future beyond the period under study. Of course we must never superimpose on an early writer reference frameworks that were developed only after his death or even after a particular moment in his career (Skinner 1969, 6). But this does not require that we avoid modern vocabulary and categories. One is writing, after all, for modern readers. More important, there is also a danger of denying the presence in an early writer's work of modern concepts merely because they are expressed differently – a sophisticated form of anachronism. Tracing the filiation of ideas may actually be impeded by a pretence of ignorance, a pretence implicit in a complaint that the debate over Ricardo has 'taken on all the characteristics of a bitterly contested paternity suit, with one side battling for Ricardo's custody within the "neo-classical" home, the other for his adoption within the "Sraffian" home. My contribution to this debate is simple. Leave him within his own surroundings' (Peach 1993, 303).[viii] For my part, I disclaim any attempt to capture Ricardo for the neo-classicals in any sense other than that specified above – the fact that the price-signalling mechanism of resource allocation is central, and explicitly so, to Ricardo's economics. If one were to imagine that the intellectual clock stopped on 11 September 1823 with Ricardo's last breath – that there were no more advances beyond his oeuvre – those features would still be there and recognizable. That they are absorbed into the 'neo-classical' paradigm is another historical fact attested to by Marshall.[ix] The recommendation to leave Ricardo 'within his own surrounding', if it is intended to convey anything more than the valid Skinner caution, is likely to blind one to perspectives actually extant and glaringly so in the Ricardo texts. In any event, why the surprise at my reading of Ricardo? The allocative function of the price system is already clearly present in Turgot.[x] And, of course, we must not forget Adam Smith.[xi]
There is a necessary, though insufficient, test for accurate interpretation. Any reading which captures the author's main theoretical conclusions inevitably leaves formulations conflicting with that interpretation. The choice between readings will turn in part on how convincingly these residuals are treated. My efforts to lay bare the residual features in my own interpretation – to state frankly the apparent weaknesses of my own interpretation – have given rise to charges of 'flights of negative imagination'. I suggest that those who oppose the New View should try to deal with their own residuals – those created by insistence that Ricardo's economics excluded (1) a powerful price-theoretic or scarcity dimension, and/or (2) market processes in the determination of the wage-rate trend in a growing system subject to land scarcity.[xii]
Examples of the burial of residuals range far beyond the forementioned matters. One striking case relates to Ricardo's concern that corn-law reform had to be carefully timed and slowly phased in:
We all have to lament the present distressed situation of the labouring classes in this country, but the remedy is not very apparent to me. The correcting of our errors in legislation with regard to trade would ultimately be of considerable service to all classes of the community, but it would afford no immediate relief: on the contrary I should expect that it would plunge us into additional difficulties. If all the prohibitions were removed from the importation of corn and many other articles, the sudden fall in the price of corn and those other articles, which could not fail to follow, would ruin most of the farmers, and many of the manufacturers; and although others would be benefited, the derangement which such measures would occasion in the actual employment of capital, and the changes which would become necessary, would rather aggravate than relieve the distress under which we are now labouring (13 October 1819; 1951, VIII, 103).
Clearly Ricardo wished to avoid any further disturbances that would magnify the need for reallocation of resources, and therefore ruled out corn law repeal as a helpful step. He only called for legislation in 1821 after the return of prosperity in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, repeal – which was not to be total in any event – should be brought about by gradual steps and after due warning with recognition of the possible need for compensation of those (other than landlords) adversely affected. Now the foregoing passage is cited by Professor Hutchison as evidence of 'great wisdom ... in the realization of ignorance and the scepticism regarding conclusions deduced from long-run, rapidly self-equilibrating models' (1978, 49--50n). But it is read as an exception – the exception that proved the rule: 'It amounts to an extreme contrast with the more typical kinds of Millian-Ricardian policy analysis.' It is not at all clear to me why at this particular point, and nowhere else, Ricardo should have shown such wisdom, and Hutchison offers no suggestions. I find Ricardo similarly responsible on the return to gold, poor law reform and – this I owe to my doctoral student Nancy Churchman – on the national debt. Had Hutchison bothered to ponder the 'exception', he might have been led to reconsider his misleading representations of Ricardian method.
Let me address next a common complaint directed against my work:
Much of the vaunted ‘interdependence of pricing and distribution’ is, by Hollander's admission, not explicit in ‘classical analysis’. ... It is only by retrospectively filling this lacuna, asking, for example, how a change in tastes would have been analysed had the ‘classical’ writers been compelled to use ‘process analysis’ that Hollander's arguments acquire their thin glaze of plausibility. To use the phrase beloved by him, this strategy is a fine example of ‘altered concentrations of attention’, where the shift is away from the textual preoccupations and methods of analysis to those supplied and adapted by Hollander' (Peach 1988, 175).
The criticsm conceals a serious issue. In the course of my work, I point out that certain disturbances may not formally have been dealt with by the original writer, but once having established that writer's analysis of similar cases it is surely fair to say how, if presented with such a disturbance, he would have been obliged to deal with it consistently with the system already established. I see nothing patently unreasonable about this procedure which is designed to recognize the status of various propositions. In any event, the specific illustration is poorly chosen since – as I subsequently became aware – Ricardo did, in fact, explicitly consider the impact of a change in tastes on distribution precisely in the manner to be expected, thereby confirming my hypothesis (see Chapter 11).
I turn briefly to the general matter of 'bias' in interpretation. Bias, of course, need not be political; it extends to one's personal sympathy for an author, and may lead to the discounting of features that less sympathetic readers put down as contradictory or meaningless. No historian is immune and the best one can do is recognize the inevitable degree of subjectivity and try to compensate. In my own case, I admit to a fondness for Ricardo as a person; his candour, incorruptibility and sense of public duty shine through so much of his writing. Moreover, the two years that I spent in a theological academy as a teenager reinforced an already-present concern with consistency rigorously instilled since about age seven. I am aware of these 'biases'. But both can serve well by encouraging recourse to the charge of inconsistency as a last not first resort.
Ideological bias in Ricardo interpretation is too big an issue to be dealt with here. I refer to the problem in Chapter 12 with respect to the Sraffian reading and there I refer to Bronfenbrenner's hypothesis – it appears in the review cited above – that Sraffa may have confused Ricardo with Marx. But I also cannot help feeling that Hutchison – the Sraffian's bête noire – attributed to Ricardo the sins of Stalin and that this perhaps somewhat coloured his interpretation (1978, 240-76). One needs to stand back a bit from one's subject to allow for a minimum of objectivity. I shall leave these matters to a later volume in this series.
* * *
The essays printed below constitute contributions to the journals on Ricardo and 'Ricardian economics' which touch directly or indirectly on the 'New View'. That the whole issue will not lie down is clear from the fact that the ink is scarcely dry on quite a few of the articles and the criticisms to which they respond. The preceding remarks have, I trust, placed Parts II, III and IV in perspective. Part V is a catch-all with a common theme in a concern with intellectual linkages, supplementing the evidence for the 'continuity thesis' in Chapters 9 and 10.
