The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall's Economic Science

This book provides a contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshalls thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshalls thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development which saw him supplementing Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegels Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshalls early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshalls mature economic science was conceived by him as but one part of a wider neo-Hegelian social philosophy.