* Throughout Marx’s mature economic writings, he treats David Ricardo (1772–1823), whose main work On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation appeared in 1817, as representing the high point of classical political economy; after 1830, the growth of working-class struggle led bourgeois economics to retreat from its own previous scientific discoveries, and to the rise of vulgar economics (see Marx’s Postface to the Second Edition of Capital Volume 1, pp. 96–7). Like that of Adam Smith, Ricardo’s work forms a constant reference point throughout Capital, and Marx devotes several chapters of Theories of Surplus-Value (Part II in the standard edition) to a critique of Ricardo’s ideas.