Alfred Marshall's Mission (Routledge Revivals)

David Reisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136703508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Alfred Marshall was anxious to do good. Intended by an Evangelical father for the vocation of clergyman, the author of the mould-shaping Principles of Economics remained to the end of his days a great preacher deeply committed to raising the tone of life. First published in 1990, Alfred Marshall's Mission explains how this most moral of political economists sought to blend the downward sloping utility function of Jevons and Menger with the organic evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer, how this celebrated theorist of social alongside economic growth sought to combine the mathematical marginalism of Cournot. Thunen and Edgeworth with the ethical uplift of Green, Jowett and Toynbee. The conclusion reached is that perhaps Marshall was, after all, too anxious to do good. Far more economists, however, have been not anxious enough; and that in itself gives this study of Marshall's life and times a present day relevance which would, no doubt, have appealed strongly to the shy Cambridge professor who is its subject.

1 Introduction

 

Keynes said that Marshall was ‘too anxious to do good’.¹ It is never very easy to say precisely how much good each of us ought to be anxious to do, and one also suspects that it is on balance better to be too anxious to do good than not anxious enough; but the point remains that Marshall was an earnest, conscientious and purposive social philosopher who regarded economic science as never more than the ‘servant’ of that ‘mistress’ which must be ethics.² As Jacob Viner puts it: ‘There have been few of us who have made conscience be our guide as to subjects of investigation and methods of analysis as steadily and as consistently as did Marshall.’³ Of course Marshall was the master-maker of tools, whose Principles of Economics are to this day, to a greater extent than is true of the insights of any other single theoretician of the past, the foundations of our own. Yet no one understands Marshall who understands only consumer's surplus and elasticity of demand, diminishing marginal utility and increasing real cost, the normal value and the equilibrium price, or who loses sight even for a moment of what Keynes so accurately diagnosed as ‘the conflict … between an intellect, which was hard, dry, critical, as unsentimental as you could find … [and] emotions and aspirations, generally unspoken, of quite a different type. When his intellect chased diagrams and Foreign Trade and Money, there was an evangelical moraliser of an imp somewhere inside him that was so ill-advised as to disapprove. Near the end of his life, when the intellect grew dimmer and the preaching imp could rise nearer to the surface to protest against its lifelong servitude, he once said: ‘“If I had to live my life over again I should have devoted it to psychology. Economics has too little to do with ideals.”’⁴ Too little perhaps, but that much more nonetheless because of the contribution of a secular missionary who, endowed with the double nature of the scientific investigator who is simultaneously a member of ‘the tribe of sages and pastors’,⁵ preferred ultimately to give the preeminence to that side of his divided personality which made him issue the following warning to academic introverts deplorably unaware of social duties:

‘We are not at liberty to play chess games, or exercise ourselves upon subtleties that lead nowhere. It is well for the young to enjoy the mere pleasure of action, physical or intellectual. But the time presses; the responsibility on us is heavy.’⁶ It comes in the circumstances as no great surprise to learn that his nephew, the economist Claude Guillebaud, was able to recall in 1970 that Marshall was a serious man of great personal integrity, deeply concerned with the social significance of his discipline as well as with the abstract technical formulations with which, by an irony of intellectual history, his name is for all time inextricably linked: ‘He disapproved profoundly if he thought he saw any indication of my having wider interests in life than the only one by which he himself was activated — the furtherance of economics as a branch of knowledge to be used in the service of mankind.’⁷ Sanctimonious, self-righteous and even intolerant though Marshall's call to arms may well appear, it is a useful antidote to the approach of those contemporary economists who never stray from the knot garden of the conventional wisdom, sedulously refined and elegantly presented, to contemplate the wider ramifications of their important subject or the ties of ethical responsibility that bind the cells willy-nilly to the organism of which they are a part. If Marshall was too anxious to do good, then it would also be true to say that such contemporary economists are not anxious enough; and that there is no better place for them to turn for intellectual regeneration and spiritual uplift than to the work of an economic moralist who thought big and whose anthropocentric, holistic, multidisciplinary and quintessentially dynamic analysis of the capitalist market economy, developed while anxious to do good, constitutes one of the most stimulating contributions to the literature which treats of the great issues.

Alfred Marshall was a missionary for economics as a science and for the economic evolution with which it is symbiotically linked; and it is with his mission that we shall be concerned in this study in intellectual biography. Our account will be divided into six central sections headed, respectively, Childhood and Cambridge, Cambridge and Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, Economics and Principles, The Evolution of the Principles, and Beyond the Principles. No conclusion is reached as to precisely how much good each of us ought to be anxious to do. What does emerge, however, is that little can be said about Alfred Marshall's life and times which does not bear in some way upon the sense of purpose and notion of service that are the twin keys to the complex personality of this most social of social economists.

2 Childhood and Cambridge

Alfred Marshall was born at Clapham on 26 July 1842. His father was a cashier in the Bank of England, with the result that Alfred enjoyed a City connection and an exposure to monetary economics at an early age. William Marshall was also somewhat of a despot in his own home (Alfred's writings abound in weasel-words such as ‘nearly’, ‘generally’, ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘on the whole’; his economics is noteworthy for its qualifications and assumptions; and a psychological explanation for such evasiveness might be the subconscious desire of the oversensitive spirit to avoid confrontation) and a strict Evangelical Christian (a man who, destining his son for a career in the ministry, compelled him to study useful subjects such as Hebrew — often, as was the case with Mill, late into the night — and forbade Alfred not only the self-indulgence of board games but ‘the fascinating paths of mathematics’ as well: ‘His father hated the sight of a mathematical book.’).¹ It must have required a great deal of courage for Alfred, at the end of his secondary education at the Merchant Taylors' School (where he was ‘small and pale, badly dressed, looked overworked and was called “tallow candles” by his fellows’)² to turn down a classics scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, in order to study mathematics (supported by a loan from an uncle) at St John's College, Cambridge. He emerged in 1865 with First Class Honours in that subject, Second Wrangler to J. W. Strutt (later Lord Rayleigh, Professor of Experimental Physics and Nobel Laureate, 1904).

His plan was to proceed with the study of molecular physics, but first Marshall took a one-year temporary teaching post at Clifton College in order to repay his uncle, before returning to Cambridge to do some tutoring for the Mathematical Tripos. It was at that time (in 1867) that he joined the Grote Club, a group of young intellectuals who met (like the more famous Apostles) to discuss fundamental issues, including the speculations of philosophy and theology. Marshall later wrote as follows about the impact that those discussions had on him:

For a year or two Sidgwick, Mozley, Clifford, Moulton, and myself were the active members, and we all attended regularly. Clifford and Moulton had at that time read but little philosophy; so they kept quiet for the first half-hour of the discussion; and listened eagerly to what others, and especially Sidgwick, said. Then they let their tongues loose, and the pace was tremendous. If I might have verbatim reports of a dozen of the best conversations I have heard, I should choose two or three from among those evenings in which Sidgwick and Clifford were the chief speakers.³

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), later to become (in 1883) Knights-bridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in Cambridge and author of seminal works such as Methods of Ethics (1874) and Principles of Political Economy (1883), was in those very Grote Club days experiencing the severe personal crisis that was inevitably his lot, given the strong desire of that most scrupulous of thinkers to remain ‘honest in the sight of all men’:

It is surely a great good that one's moral position should be one that simple-minded people can understand. I happen to care very little what men in general think of me individually: but I care very much about what they think of human nature. I dread doing anything to support the plausible suspicion that men in general, even those who profess lofty aspirations, are secretly swayed by material interests.⁴

As early as 1861, Sidgwick had been expressing his doubts about the Anglican communion in correspondence with his friends Browning (to whom he wrote of his fear of ‘perjury’: ‘I see that there is a great gulf between my views and the views once held by those who framed the Articles’)⁵ and Dakyns (to whom he confided the great problem he felt he faced ‘of reconciling my religious instinct with my growing conviction that both individual and social morality ought to be placed on an inductive basis’)⁶ but had nonetheless, in 1863, subscribed to the 39 Articles of the Faith at the time of his appointment to a Fellowship at Trinity. It obviously mattered greatly to him that no one should think he had subscribed merely for personal gain while believing only ‘laxly’ in the doctrines he espoused; and thus it happened in 1869 that the punctilious philosopher felt he had no choice but to resign his Fellowship (without, incidentally, leaving the Church) in order, as he put it, ‘to free myself from dogmatic obligations’.⁷ Sidgwick's courageous action figured prominently in the arguments mustered by academic liberals in their attempts (ultimately successful in June 1871) to secure the abolition of religious tests, and was in addition widely seen as living proof of an instance where a highminded man had opted to translate his convictions into practice. Besides that, Sidgwick himself was held in such esteem in Cambridge that in a sense he was compelled by his reputation to practice what he preached: as one don later put it, ‘though we kept our own fellowships without believing more than he did, we should have felt that Henry Sidgwick had fallen short if he had not renounced his’.⁸ His courage, his crisis of faith, his intellectual integrity, his search for an ethical system linked more to society than to Scripture — all of this clearly made a deep impact upon the young Alfred Marshall, who was later to describe the Sidgwick of the Grote Club days as his ‘spiritual father and mother’:⁹ ‘He was more to me than all the rest of the University’.¹⁰ Purposiveness was bound to speak to purposiveness. And the young mathematician was facing a crisis of his own.

Intended by his father for the vocation of the clergyman, while an undergraduate still a young man of deep religious conviction, Marshall by the time he met Sidgwick was himself having serious doubts about the wisdom of ordination and questioning the desirability of the theological straitjacket that inhibits all questioning: ‘His zeal directed itself at times towards the field of Foreign Missions. A missionary he remained all his life, but after a quick struggle religious beliefs dropped away, and he became, for the rest of his life … an agnostic.’¹¹ Even the saintly Sidgwick never made so radical a move. Yet Marshall, in turning his back on the faith of his father, never became militantly anti-religious or sought to replace the Church of God with the Church of Science. Rather the opposite, in fact: ‘He sympathised with Christian morals and Christian ideals and Christian incentives. … At the end of his life he said “Religion seems to have given me an attitude”, and that, though he had give up Theology, he believed more and more in Religion.’¹² Partly, one suspects, this is because he saw religion as a spiritual corrective to the greedy materialism of competitive capitalism. Thus he wrote in 1881 that ‘religion has this quality: that it belongs to all men alike; and the joys of religion are the highest joys of which men are capable. The poor man who is religious is far happier than the rich man who is not. (I use the word religion in its widest sense, of all that elevates the soul of man towards God.)’¹³ An advocate of ‘fellow-feeling with men far off and near’¹⁴ and of a society of gentlemen characterised by equality of respect, Marshall could not but reverence religion — and the Christian religion in particular — precisely because of its stress on equality of humanity irrespective of temporal status. Thus, in one of his few direct references to Christianity, Marshall, speaking of ‘the Teutonic races that peopled Western Europe’, says: ‘They always had a reverence for men as men, and this reverence was promoted by the Christian religion, and fostered by the popular character of the mediaeval church. They did not deliberately treat it as a matter of indifference whether those who did hard work for them lived debased lives. They never got thoroughly to despise the worker or his work; so they have not become frivolous, apathetic or selfish; and their civilisation seems likely to endure.’¹⁵ The concept of Christian charity must in addition have had a great appeal to the theorist of profit-seeking who was also the advocate of ‘deliberate unselfishness’ such as ‘never existed before the modern age’:¹⁶ ‘Our age’, Marshall noted in 1907, ‘has reversed the old rules that the poor paid a larger percentage of their income in rates and taxes than the well-to-do’,¹⁷ and this incre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 CHILDHOOD AND CAMBRIDGE
• 3 CAMBRIDGE AND BRISTOL
• 4 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE
• 5 ECONOMICS AND PRINCIPLES
• 6 THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCIPLES
• 7 BEYOND THE PRINCIPLES
• 8 CONCLUSION
• Notes and References
• Index