Conclusion

Abstract

Alfred Marshall was anxious to do good. He was also anxious to do good quite specifically through economics. Green and Jowett, Carlyle and Ruskin, looked over his shoulder even as he formalised the concepts of elasticity and quasi-rent; Toynbee Hall and the University Extension Movement, the Charity Organisation Societies and the union provident funds, put him on the alert even as he theorised about monopoly prices and equilibrium states; Darwin the evolutionist and Spencer the improver, Foxwell the Methodist and Ashley the Churchman, stared meaningfully back at him from the mirror even as he translated marginal utility and economies of size into the terse language of the differential calculus; and the result is a distinctive whole qualitatively different from the sum of the parts, an intellectual organism that is not the simple aggregate of its discrete cells. The mix is quite unlike anything that had been seen before or has been encountered since. It is in that mix that Alfred Marshall’s mission is most clearly to be found.