Re: Alfred Marshall -reply

[STEC8063@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

"Professor Marshall's work, for instance, is, in aim, even if not always in
achievement, a theoretical handling of human activity in its economic
bearing, -- an inquiry into the multiform phases and ramifications of that
process of valuation of the material means of life by virtue of which man is
an economic agent.  And still it remains an inquiry directed to the
determination of the conditions of an equilibrium of activities and a quiescent
normal situation.  It is not in any eminent degree an inquiry into cultural or
institutional development as affected by economic exigencies or by the economic
interest of the men whose activities are analysed and portrayed.  Any
sympathetic reader of Professor Marshall's great work -- and that must mean
every reader -- comes away with a sense of swift and smooth movement and
interaction of parts; but it is movement of a consummately conceived and self-
balanced mechanism, not that of a cumulatively unfolding exigencies."
                                              Thorstein Veblen


Veblen's analysis of Marshall in the third of his preconceptions essays,
from which the above quote is taken, is a good antidote for the tendency
of reading too much into Marshall's comments on biology and biological
metaphors.  Marshall, as Veblen notes, has an evolutionary air but not the
essence of evolution, which is for Veblen cumulative change, and the process
by which this change comes about.  IMHO, Robinson's historical time critique
makes the most sense as a call to move towards the evolutionary institutional
analysis which Veblen avocated, which would necessarily include the history
which JR wants in economics and which neoclassical general equilibrium theory
necessarily excludes for its analysis, and not merely a logical critique of the
notion of time.

Gra agus sonas,
Charley Clark
Department of Economics
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland
stec8063@xxxxxx