INTRODUCTION

Alfred Marshall spent most of his academic career at the University of Cambridge, eventually retiring as Professor of Political Economy there in 1908 after more than forty years’ academic service within the UK. He was an important theorist in his own right, but he is perhaps best remembered today as a brilliant synthesizer of existing ideas, bringing flashes of insight from various parts of the literature into a single theoretical system (Hodgson 2001). More than anybody else, he was responsible for fleshing out the contributions that various marginalist techniques could be expected to make to economic theory as if they had all come from the same hand (Maloney 1991). The ideas on which he drew were therefore by no means all his own, although he did put his distinctive gloss on them in his renowned book, The Principles of Economics. It went through eight editions, eventually totalling 870 pages, and it was quickly seized upon as the authoritative text for learning about the market concept in what I have called its analytical form. For a number of decades it was as if economics in its orthodox Anglophone guise was specifically Marshallian. George Stigler published his Theory of Price in 1946 and Paul Samuelson his Economics in 1948 in an attempt to dislodge Marshall’s Principles of Economics as the dominant teaching text. Their aim was that they might showcase the work of a newer generation of neoclassical economists.

So great were Marshall’s skills as a synthesizer that theoretical discoveries were often attributed to him retrospectively, even when they had appeared earlier in their original form in someone else’s writings.