In an assessment of Alfred Marshall, Paul Samuelson (1967) writes that “The ambiguities of Alfred Marshall paralyzed the best brains in the Anglo-Saxon branch of our profession for three decades.” In making this assessment he carried on a tradition of Marshall-bashing that has a long history in economics, dating back to Stanley Jevons and F. Y. Edgeworth, who accused Marshallian economists of being seduced by “zig zag windings of the flowery path of literature” (Edgeworth, 1925).

These harsh assessments of Marshall and his approach to economics have influenced the modern profession and, other than historians of economic thought, few young economists know much about him. Fewer still see themselves as Marshallians.

Today, Marshall is best remembered for his contribution to partial equilibrium supply and demand analysis. For the true economic theorists of the 1990s, however, this contribution is de minimus; the partial equilibrium approach is for novice economists with no stomach for real economic theory – general equilibrium. The profession's collective view of Marshall in the 1990s is that Marshall is passé – at most a pedagogical stepping stone for undergraduate students, but otherwise quite irrelevant to modern economics. The motto of recent 20th century economics has been:

Since Marshall's name is synonymous with partial equilibrium analysis, the title of this paper will seem strange to many.