Alfred Marshall as a Social Economist

Alfred Marshall has gone down in the history of economic ideas as the quintessential neo-classicist, as the high priest of a deductivist orthodoxy who wrote much of consumer's surplus, marginal cost, economies of scale, elasticity of demand and the Giffen good but impounded in the oblivion of the ceteris paribus the constructs of societal constraint, ethical standards, institutional evolution, perpetual search and the shared identity. The result has been that some of the most sensitive of social economists have found in his work little more than an abstract and dehumanised marginalism, a self-interested and calculative rationality which somehow manages to combine a morally suspect methodology that treats people as things with an obsolete analytical framework that treats things themselves in a manner now profoundly out of date. Thus, Jacob Viner, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Principles mid-way between Poland and Pearl Harbor, made clear that he had come to bury the great book, not to praise it: Marshall's economics is now distinctly that of a generation which is past, and is increasingly not that of our own . . . Both the Victorian complacency with respect to the present and the Victorian optimism with respect to future progress are now utterly inappropriate. As a social philosopher, Marshall is not yet merely a period piece. If he should become so in the near future, it would properly be a matter for concern, but not for surprise (Viner, 1941, p. 235). John Kenneth Galbraith, more than four decades later and deeply troubled about the nature of technostruc ture-dominated corporate capitalism, was no more enthusiastic nor less dismissive: Marshall's world of competitive entrepreneurs, maximiz? ing consumers and a suitably reticent state continues to serve the ends of comfortable orthodoxy today. It does not describe the world as it is . . . But to have mastered Marshall was a good thing. To know what is right, one must have a firm grasp on what is wrong (Galbraith

Economic history · Economics · Keynesian economics · Mathematical economics · Neoclassical economics · Positive economics · Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions

• A challenge to Marshallian orthodoxy on industrial clustering

  Open Access•Michèle E M Akoorie•Journal of Management History•2011

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• Twin Brothers in Marshallian Thought

  Jesús M Zaratiegui•Review of Political Economy•1997

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• Money Credit and Commerce

  F Y Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall•The Economic Journal•1923

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• Elements of Economics of Industry

  L L Price, Alfred Marshall•The Economic Journal•1892

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