Conclusion

Abstract

The main thesis of this book is that the collapse of the Marshallian research programme was due to an inherent split in the very make-up of the programme itself. Marshall’s contribution to the state of political economy in the late nineteenth century was considerable (see, for example, Deane, 1989, pp. 134–41), but it was also essentially a compromise: by drawing together and reconciling many of the different strands of political economy Marshall’s framework helped weld economics into a distinct and separate discipline (the methodological issues being dealt with at much the same time by Keynes’s father, John Neville, in his Scope and Method of Political Economy first published in 1890 — see Deane, 1983). The cost of the compromise was that not all the problems could actually be resolved into a single framework and some cracks were thus papered over.