The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall's Economic Science
A Rounded Globe of Knowledge

This book shows how Marshall's distinctive contributions to modern economics grew out of his early development of a neo-Hegelian social philosophy.

Simon J. Cook (Author)

9781107514126, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 March 2015

352 pages
23 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'This reconstruction of the foundations of Alfred Marshall's social philosophy is the product of original research on the manuscripts that reveal the breadth and depth of Marshall's intellectual concerns during his apprenticeship years. In addition to being a thorough contextual study of the intellectual origins of Marshall's better-known economic writings, Simon Cook's book helps to explain those pervasive idealistic and historical dimensions to Marshall's work that have often perplexed even his closest followers.' Donald Winch, University of Sussex

This book provides a contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall's thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall's thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, which saw him supplementing Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel's Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall's early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall's mature economic science was conceived by him as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian, social philosophy.

Introduction
Part I. The Contexts of Marshall's Intellectual Apprenticeship: 1. The state of long-term memories
2. A liberal education
Part II. Dualist Moral Science: 1867–71: 3. Mental crisis
4. The way of all flesh
5. Political economy
Part III. Neo-Hegelian political economy: 1872–3: 6. A philosophy of history
7. Missing links: the education of the working classes
Epilogue. 'A Rounded Globe of Knowledge': 8. Social philosophy and economic science.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Economics [KC], History of ideas [JFCX]