Alfred Marshall: Progress and Politics

First published in 1987, Alfred Marshall: Progress and Politics provides an enlightening insight into Marshall’s thoughts on social improvement, adaptive upgrading, policy and polity. He planned books on these subjects which he never subsequently wrote, but the thesis of this work is that a close study of such writings as Marshall did complete makes possible a very detailed reconstruction of the important contribution which Marshall was capable of making to Victorian evolutionary thought (much in the shadow of Darwin and Spencer). In the ongoing debate on the political element in political economy, he reveals himself to have been as much an eclectic as was Adam Smith and as much a man of commitment as was T. H. Green.