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George Stigler: Marshall’s Loyal but Faithless Follower

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George Stigler

Abstract

George Stigler judged Alfred Marshall to be almost incomparably superior to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. However, despite being a loyal defender of Marshall’s intellectual heritage, Stigler epitomised the faithless follower of Marshall’s tradition. His fervent defence of traditional price theory and industrial organisation clearly embraced a methodological approach that was fundamentally opposed to that advocated by Marshall. Stigler’s influential assessments and commentaries involved a distortion of Marshall’s perspective on key issues such as the nature of competition, the role of economies of scale, and the dynamic or evolutionary dimensions of market structures. For Marshall to be a hero to Stigler, some significant elements of Marshall’s economics had to be recreated in such a way as to concur with his own vision of what constituted positive developments in economic analysis.

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  1. University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Neil Hart

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  1. Neil Hart
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Correspondence to Neil Hart .

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  1. University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Craig Freedman

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Hart, N. (2020). George Stigler: Marshall’s Loyal but Faithless Follower. In: Freedman, C. (eds) George Stigler. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56815-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56815-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56814-4

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