Marshall and Pigou

["RICHARD P.F. HOLT" <holtri@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Recently Allin Cottrell and Michael Lawlor put on a conference at
Wake Forest University titled "New Perspectives on Keynes". The papers
were diverse and looked at Keynes and his work in very interesting ways.
Peter Groenewegen presented a paper called "Keynes and Marshall:
methodology, society and politics". In the paper he says, "Pigou never
absorbed Marshall's message on method, conceptualisation, the nature of
abstraction, style and vision, parts of Marshall's economic legacy which
Keynes found attractive and emphasised, not only in his tribute to Marshall,
but in the practice of his own work....This Marshallian methodological
legacy is preserved in the _General_Theory_ by adopting a number of important
features of Marshall's analytical engine. One of these is Marshall's limited
emphasis on the virtues of market clearing as compared with Pigou, and his
hesitancy in applying the supply and demand appartaus to the labour
market."p.13  The upshot of the paper was to explain how much Keynes was
influenced by Marshall and how Keynes, in many ways, extended the ideas,
methodology and political and philosophical vision of Marshall. Bob Coats
was the discussant and said, which I agreed with, that the paper might go
a little too far in suggesting the close similarities between Marshall and
Keynes. If one holds on to the belief that Keynes, mostly, extended the
Marshallian heritage then this undercuts the revolutionary side of Keynes's
work it seems to me. But the paper brought up another issue which Michael
Lawlor brought up in discussion. If Pigou really did not understand or
pushed Marshall's work in a direction that he was not sympathetic towards
then why did Marshall name Pigou as the person to replace him. The impression
I got from Peter's paper is that there really was very little in common
between Pigou and Marshall and the true attraction was between Marshall
and Keynes.
-Ric Holt