The Ricardian socialists are generally considered to be four in number. Claims have been made for the addition of Charles Hall, T. R. Edmonds, Piercy Ravenstone ‘etc. etc. and four more pages of etceteras’ but the relative sophistication of the analysis of Hodgskin, Bray, Gray and Thompson does set them apart as a distinctive group of writers. They grasped the prime importance of formulating a theory of value to use as a foundation for their critical analysis; they saw the utility of value theory as a means of explaining the maldistribution of wealth (exploitation of labour) which characterised capitalism and they integrated their theories of value and distribution with a macroeconomic explanation of general economic depression. In addition and in contrast to Robert Owen they distinguished analytically the beneficiaries of exploitation and defined them in terms of their socio-economic role. It is these things, together with a complementary recognition of the salient characteristics of nascent industrial capitalism, which set Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray and Gray apart from other anti-capitalist and socialist writers of the period.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that Bray's major contribution to socialist political economy, Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, was not published until 1839 and so lies outside the chronological limits of this study. Nevertheless, some notice will be taken of aspects of Bray's contribution in so far as it may throw light on the nature of anti-capitalist and socialist political economy in the 1820s and early 1830s.