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

Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

by Simon J. Cook

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.

Genres: Economics

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

I’m an intellectual historian, writing on late-Victorian and Edwardian scholarship.

I was born in London, England, spent too many years at Cambridge, UK, and taught academic writing at Duke University, North Carolina.

Today I’m an independent scholar, creating intellectual content outside established academic institutions.

I support my scholarly habit with my editing work and live, together with a growing family of children, guinea-pigs and cats, in a small village in Israel situated just left of the end of the world.