Marshall, the Cambridge School, and the Professionalisation of Economics
Marshall’s appointment to the Cambridge Chair in 1885 reflected the high esteem in which he was held in the profession despite the absence of a major publication, with the first edition of his Principles not appearing until 1890. Much of Marshall’s esteem undoubtedly arose from the high regard with which he was held as an academic administrator and educator at Cambridge and Bristol, and as his Cambridge colleague Somerton Foxwell (1887: 92) noted, ‘half the economics chairs in the United Kingdom’ were occu?pied by his former pupils. At the time Marshall was elected to the Chair at Cambridge, the status of economics in terms of its academic and professional standing appears to have been at a rather low point, and the prospects for further advancement were not immediately encouraging. Economics was looked upon in the main as a minor and disputed area of study, with many of its lecturers and professors recruited or ‘borrowed’ from other established disciplines. This perception was conveyed candidly in the introduction to Henry Sidgwick’s Principles of Political Economy, which refers to the objective decline of political economy and its growing unpopularity in the outside world:
In short, when the concluding quarter of this century began, it was evident that Political Economy had returned to the condition in which it was in the second quarter; and that McCulloch’s melancholy admission that ‘the differences which have subsisted among the most eminent of its professors have proved exceedingly unfavourable to its progress, and have generated a disposition to distrust its best established conclusions’ was again only too applicable (Sidgwick 1883: 6).
As stated in his Inaugural Lecture, Marshall’s first objective was the attainment of a new status for economics within the academic programmes at Cambridge, where economics had sheltered under the shadows of the Historical and Moral Sciences and struggled to attract students. In his resolute pursuit of this objective, Marshall became embroiled in a protracted and at times heated campaign against the Special Boards of Moral Sciences and History, bringing him into direct conflict with his early mentor, Sidgwick, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Sciences at Cambridge from 1883.[1] Marshall went on to achieve his ambition with the establishment of a separate Economics Tripos in 1903, and while the number of students enrolling in economics at Cambridge, together with the teaching resources, was initially largely unaffected by the creation of the new Tripos, the Cambridge School of Economics had grown from these rather humble beginnings to become a prominent force within the academic economics profession by the closing years of Marshall’s life. Apart from his activities at Cambridge, Marshall’s leadership of the profession was witnessed though his role in the formation of the British Economic Association and its flagship publication, the Economic Journal. While the ongoing management of these ventures was left in the hands of others, Marshall continued to play a significant indirect role in the dealings of the Association and its journal. Marshall’s diverse and extensive services to government inquiries also accentuated the role of the academic economist in public affairs, helping to reinforce the impression of specialist skills that define the professionally trained economist (Groenewegen 1995: 343-398). In addition, the successive editions of Marshall’s Principles took on the role of a widely recognised textbook, albeit one that came to be consulted selectively so as to sidestep the more ‘troublesome’ qualifications and ambiguities otherwise encountered.
Clearly, Marshall had succeeded in guiding and conducting the affairs of a heterogeneous group of academics who shared the common ambition of establishing economics as a distinct discipline with a recognised set of professional standards and institutions. As Bob Coats (1967: 711) observed in his investigation into the sociological aspects of British economic thought during the Marshallian era, Marshall effectively ‘led economics from the rear’, assembling the structure that would support the professionalisation process, and then manoeuvring his colleagues in whatever way he saw appropriate to reinforce these structures. In this setting, Marshall could be described as the unpopular leader of an ambition that few economists could resist, possessing a remarkable talent for generating antagonism amongst his contemporaries, critics, and supporters alike, relentlessly pressuring his disciples to structure their careers and plan their lectures in ways that promoted the directions he believed the economics profession should journey.[2] A key strategy for Marshall was to portray economics to the scientific community in a way which emphasised the solidarity of its principles—one that had finally overcome the ‘battle of methods’ that threatened its survival during the middle of the nineteenth century. While the development of economic analysis was to be seen as an ongoing programme, it was not to be associated with irreconcilable disputes over theory or methodology. Marshall acclaimed the contributions of his contemporaries that he depicted as strengthening the existing economics edifice, and defended the reputations of his revered classical predecessors. He was, for example, strongly opposed to Jevon’s (1879: 1) assertion that Ricardo had ‘shunted the car of economic science on a wrong line’, and that consequently, it was necessary to ‘pick up the fragments of a shattered science and to start anew’. There were, however, limits to the extent to which heterogeneity was tolerated, with a particularly notable example found in the case of J.A. Hobson, who was unable to find his rightful place in the economics profession for reasons signified by the subtitle of his co-authored Physiology of Industry: ‘Being an Exposure of Certain Fallacies in Existing Theories of Economics’. While a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches were acceptable within the economics profession under Marshall’s reign, the ‘exposure of fallacies’ was not to be encouraged. Similarly, criticisms from ‘economic amateurs’ were swiftly dispatched with by the ‘professionals’.
Marshall was particularly concerned not to be associated with the creation of a new doctrinal ‘school’, instead linking his own contributions with what he claimed to be continuity in economic thought. Assertions that Marshall was a ‘Menger-like’ figure who set out to establish a ‘neoclassical-marginalist’ orthodoxy that would extinguish the flames of the English Historical School rest on the untenable proposition that Marshall was in fact an opponent of the Historical School, for as Gerald Shove (1942: 309) concluded in his highly discerning estimation of Marshall’s work, if any school of thought outside the Ricardian tradition set its mark on the Principles, it was the Historical School, rather than the marginal utility school. Indeed, WJ. Ashley, a prominent associate of the Historical School, was moved to state in his review of Marshall’s Principles that ‘it brings a message of conciliation to divergent schools, and it makes it possible for “deductive” and “historical”, “scientific” and “e thical” economists to “work together in harmony”’ (Ashley 1891: 489). To some extent, the perception of a significant methodological divide between Marshall and the English Historical School and their supporters rests on Marshall’s often referred to exchanges with William Cunningham, who plainly saw Marshall as belonging securely in the deductive camp, a perception that Marshall was keen to distance himself from. The ‘urgency’ of Marshall’s public responses to Cunningham to a significant extent reflected Marshall’s displeasure with Cunningham’s opposition to the Economics Tripos at Cambridge, along with Cunningham’s proposal for the partitioning of political economy into economic history and economic lexicography.
Having successfully established economics as a distinct part of the teaching programme, Marshall’s attention at Cambridge eventually became focused on the inevitable question of the succession to the Cambridge Chair. Here we observe Marshall’s active and at times perfidious support for A.C. Pigou over Herbert Somerton Foxwell. Foxwell had been one of Marshall’s first students in the moral sciences, and went on to lecture in logic, psychology, and phi?losophy, before moving to economics where he lectured for over 30 years at Cambridge and University College London. He was one of Marshall’s most dutiful allies, and Marshall frequently turned to Foxwell for assistance in the implementation of his plans. While there were significant differences between the two on matters of public policy and the direction of the new Economics Tripos, these matters were unlikely to have weighed heavily in Marshall’s plans. Rather, the most significant reason why Marshall supported Pigou over Foxwell for the Chair arose from what was perceived to be in the best interests of the consolidation of the economics teaching programme at Cambridge and the economics professionalisation process in general.
Importantly, Marshall’s support for Pigou was not based on a belief that Pigou would guide economic analysis along the pathway that Marshall had championed in his published writings. Unlike Foxwell, Pigou’s preferences strongly favoured the development of pure theory, despite his own credentials as a historian, a methodological stance that departed fundamentally from that which informed Marshall’s contributions. Indeed, in his private correspondence and manuscript notes on Pigous Wealth and Welfare, reproduced with insightful commentary in Bharadwaj (1972), Marshall expressed serious reservations regarding Pigou’s unqualified usage of the statical method in dealing with the laws of return, concluding that the supply curve of the type constructed by Pigou had ‘no reality’ (Marshall quoted in ibid.: 33). However, these fundamental concerns about Pigou’s method were never communicated in Marshall’s published writings. This was indicative of Marshall’s willingness to compromise his own views on the nature and method of economic analysis in order to facilitate the professionalisation process, and a refusal to publicly question the contributions of close professional colleagues, including Pigou but also prominent others such as Edgeworth, whose approach to economic analysis departed markedly from that he had advocated. All of this serves to illustrate the fact that Marshall’s pivotal role in the professionalisation process was not driven by the desire to provide leadership on issues of economic theory and method.
- [1] Sidgwick (1838—1900) was not only highly regarded by his contemporaries in philosophy, but was alsoa significant contributor to the economics literature and debate. In addition to the Economics Triposstruggles, a substantial issue that fractured the relationship between Marshall and Sidgwick arose fromMarshall’s prominent opposition to Sidgwick’s draft resolution designed to give women limited access toa degree at Cambridge. Marshall’s opposition to Sidgwick’s keenly devised proposal was contrary to hispreviously enthusiastic and functional support for the university education of women during his earlieryears at Cambridge, to say nothing of his (short-lived) academic collaboration with Mary Paley Marshall.Again, Marshall’s shifting stance on the question of women’s education at Cambridge reflects ratherpoorly on his character and dealings with his closest colleagues (see further discussion in McWilliams Tullberg 1975).
- [2] This corresponds with the conclusion reached by Maloney (1985). Such a perception emerges mostdirectly from the diary entries and correspondence between Marshall and John Neville Keynes, who, fora time at least, was Marshall’s closest and most important and trusted professional ally. As revealedthrough Deane’s (2001) extensive examination of these archives, many instances reflect unfavourably onMarshall’s character, judgement, and professional dealings with his colleagues.
