¹ Parsons, T., ‘Wants and Activities in Marshall’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, xlvi (1931)Google Scholar; reprint Alfred Marshall: Critical Assessments, ed. J. C. Wood, 4 vols., London, Sydney, and Dover, N. H., 1982, i. 179–208; Parsons, T., ‘Economics and Sociology: Marshall in Relation to the Thought of His Time’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, xlvi (1932)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, i. 209–31. Keynes, Schumpeter, and Guillebaud provide the three best known instances of disparaging comments: Keynes regretted that ‘the piercing eyes and ranging wings of an eagle were often called back to earth to do the bidding of a moraliser’, Keynes, J. M., ‘Alfred Marshall’, in Memorials of Alfred Marshall, ed. Pigou, A. C., London, 1925, p. 12Google Scholar; Schumpeter found that Marshall's ‘preaching of mid-Victorian morality, seasoned by Benthamism’ was ‘irritating’, Schumpeter, J. A., ‘Alfred Marshall's Principles. A Semi-centennial Appraisal’, American Economic Review, xxxi (1941)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, ii. 109; and Guillebaud advised the reader ‘to skip over without too much feeling of annoyance, those passages which are a reflection, in Schumpeter's phrase, of Marshall's “mid-Victorian morality, seasoned by Benthamism”’, Guillebaud, C. W., ‘Marshall's Principles of Economics in the Light of Contemporary Economic Thought’, Economica, xix (1952)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, ii. 189. However, Schumpeter's hurried dismissal was largely compensated by his careful and positive evaluation of Marshall's evolutionary anthropology, where his ethics really belonged, and Keynes's regretful remark was followed by the statement that ‘the diversity of his nature was pure advantage’.

² See Becattini, G., ‘Invito a una Rilettura di Marshall’, Introduzione, Marshall, A. e M. P., Economia della Produzione, Milano, 1975, ix–cxiGoogle Scholar; Whitaker, J. K., ‘The Evolution of Alfred Marshall's Economic Thought and Writings over the Years 1867–90’, Introduction, The Early Economic Writings of Alfred Marshall, ed. Whitaker, J. K., 2 vols., London, 1975, i. 3–113Google Scholar; Whitaker, J. K., ‘Some Neglected Aspects of Alfred Marshall's Economic and Social Thought’, History of Political Economy, ix (1977)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, i. 453–86; Chasse, J. D., ‘Marshall, the Human Agent and Economic Growth: Wants and Activities Revisited’, History of Political Economy, xvi (1984), 381–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maloney, J., Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics, Cambridge, 1985Google Scholar; Collini, S., Winch, D., and Burrow, J., That Noble Science of Politics, London, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reisman, D., Alfred Marshall. Progress and Politics, London, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reisman, D., Alfred Marshall's Mission, London, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coats, A. W., ‘Marshall and Ethics’, in Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, ed. Tullberg, R. McWilliams, Aldershot, 1990, pp. 153–77Google Scholar; Black, R. D. C., ‘Jevons, Marshall and the Utilitarian Tradition’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, xxxvii (1990), 5–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ R. Visker on the contrary, seems to be happy with Parsons's critique of the conventionality of Marshall's Anglo-Protestant ethics. He too thinks that Marshall's ethics is inseparable from his economics but goes on to infer from this that the WASP tenor of the former invalidates the latter, ‘Marshallian Ethics and Economics: Deconstructing the Authority of Science’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, xviii (1988), 179–99Google Scholar. Other recent articles on Marshall's ethics are: Jensen, H. E., ‘Value Premises in the Economic Thought of Alfred Marshall’, Économie Appliquée, xliii (1990), 19–35Google Scholar; Petridis, A., ‘The Trade Unions in the Principles: The Ethical versus the Practical in Marshall's Economies’, Économie Appliquée, xliii (1990), 161–86Google Scholar. Henderson, J. P. gives an interesting account of the reception of Marshall's Principles by ‘ethicist’ philosophers in his article ‘The Ethicists' View of Marshall's Principles’, Review of Social Economy, xlviii (1990), 361–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Marshall's early involvement with psychology, discussed below, is confirmed by a manuscript fragment which he wrote much later: ‘psychology seemed to hold out good promise of constructive and progressive studies of human nature and its possibilities: and I thought that it might best meet my wants’, quoted in Whitaker, , Introduction, Early Economic Writings, i. 6Google Scholar. Whitaker calls this a ‘brief dalliance with the infant study of psychology’, but I propose to consider it a more serious affair with a grown-up subject, as suggested by Marshall's own recollections: ‘About 1871–2, 1 told myself the time had come at which I must decide whether to give my life to psychology or economics. I spent a year in doubt: always preferring psychology for the pleasures of the chase; but economics grew and grew in practical urgency’ Marshall, to Ward, James, 23 09 1900Google Scholar; in Memorials, p. 418. Later on, this choice was to be regretted, as confirmed by Keynes's report of Marshall saying, near the end of his life, ‘if I had to live my life over again I should have devoted it to psychology’, Memorials, p. 37.

⁵ ‘The Early Philosophical Writings of Alfred Marshall’, ed. Raffaelli, T., Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Archival Supplement, iv (1994), 150Google Scholar.

⁶ For an interpretation of these papers, see my introductory essay, ‘Marshall's Analysis of the Human Mind’, ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 57–93.

⁷ Early critiques of the wages fund theory can be taken as the first serious signs of the danger and Mill's ‘recantation’ as an answer to it. Marshall's interest in the debate is well documented by Dardi, M., Il Giovane Marshall: Accumulazione e Mercato, Bologna, 1983Google Scholar. For an example of the connections between socio-ethical and methodological problems, see Ingram, J. K., ‘The Present Position and Prospects of Political Economy’, Essays in Economic Method, ed. Smith, R. L., London, 1962Google Scholar.

⁸ Pareto's positivist approach is the first of a series of independent efforts to free economics from both psychology and ethics, which have become prominent in our century (e.g. Robbins and Popper).

⁹ On the diffusion of similar ideas in England cf. Smith, , Maloney, , and Kadish, A., Historians, Economists, and Economic History, London and New York, 1989Google Scholar. In America Veblen supported this view with clear methodological awareness.

¹⁰ Parsons, T., ‘Wants and Activities in Marshall’, Critical Assessments, i. 202Google Scholar.

¹¹ Marshall, A., Principles of Economics, ed. Guillebaud, C. W., 2 vols., London, 1961, i. pp. vi and 26–7Google Scholar.

¹² Ibid., p. 15.

¹³ ‘The almost exclusive use of money as a measure of motives is, so to speak, an accident, and perhaps an accident that is not found in other worlds than ours’ where different ‘definite and transferable’ measures could take its place, Principles, i. 782–3, and Memorials, pp. 158–9.

¹⁴ Principles, i. 17. The substitution is anticipated in ‘Speech to the Meeting of the British Economic Association’, Economic Journal, iii (1893), 389Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Green, T. H., Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. Bradley, A. C., Oxford, 1883Google Scholar, bk. III, ch. I, § 159.

¹⁶ The above quoted sentence is probably aimed at Sidgwick and Green no less than at Mackenzie, who, according to Henderson, was the specific target, cf. Sidgwick, H., ‘Pleasure and Desire’, Contemporary Review, xix (1872), 662–72Google Scholar; Sidgwick, H., The Methods of Ethics, London, 1874Google Scholar, bk. I, ch. IV. Cf. also this undated comment by Marshall: ‘Varieties of knowledge. Ceteris paribus, that is most valuable to the world which is cumulative. From this point of view any branch of knowledge is to be prima facie condemned in which advanced students find it still profitable to read books written very long ago. E.g. Metaphysics as compared to Psychology’, quoted in Introduction, ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 73. This is Bacon's lesson brought to new light.

¹⁷ Marshall, M. Paley, What I Remember, Cambridge, 1947, p. 19Google Scholar. Cf. also Shove, G. F., ‘The Place of Marshall's Principles in the Development of Economic Theory’, Economic Journal, lii (1942)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, ii. 141.

¹⁸ On these differences cf. Zanni, A., ‘Pareto's Monologue with Marshall’, Quaderni di Storia del'Economia Politica, ix (1991), 399–421Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Principles, ii. 236.

²⁰ Cf. Marshall's persistent use of the term ‘pleasure’ in Principles, e.g. i. 119–23.

²¹ Cf. Shove, , Critical Assessments, ii. 141Google Scholar; Whitaker, , ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 478, (but see also p. 470)Google Scholar; Matthews, R. C. O., ‘Marshall and the Labour Market’, in Centenary Essays on Alfred Marshall, ed. Whitaker, J. K., Cambridge, 1990, p. 26Google Scholar.

²² What I Remember, pp. 18–19.

²³ Black, 13. Somewhat autobiographical in the light of Keynes's ideas about himself – ‘we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition’, Keynes, J. M., Essays in Biography, ed. Robinson, A. and Moggridge, D., London, 1972Google Scholar, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, x. 445 – is his statement that ‘Marshall never departed explicitly from the Utilitarian ideas which dominated the generation of economists who preceded him’, Memorials, p. 9.

²⁴ Grote, J., An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, ed. Major, J. B., Cambridge, 1870, p. 252Google Scholar, copy annotated by Marshall, Marshall Library of Economics. Grote's criticisms of John Mill's and Bentham's opinions are qualified by Marshall as ‘scarcely honest’ (p. 19), ‘unfair’ (pp. 40 and 235), due to ‘misunderstanding’ (p. 96) and ‘mis-representation’ (p. 131).

²⁵ Cf. Black, 14; Maloney, p. 10; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 312 and 319.

²⁶ Parsons's preference for Pareto is explicitly due to his own anxiety about the imperialistic tendency of economics to expand into general sociology, ‘Economics and Sociology’, Critical Assessments, i. 227.

²⁷ Marshall to B. Kidd, 6 June 1894, Marshall Library of Economics. Cf. also his articles in The Bee-Hive, where he defends ‘that system of division of labour which rules in the world of thought’ but qualifies this opinion and goes along with Mill to insist ‘that economic investigations should be clearly distinguished from ethical discussions, even when they cannot be separated from them’, Harrison, R., ‘Two Early Articles by Alfred Marshall’, Economic Journal, lxxiii (1963)Google Scholar; reprint Critical Assessments, iv. 123 and 125.

²⁸ See Reisman, D., Progress and Politics, pp. 349ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Principles, i. 17.

³⁰ Ibid., 14.

³¹ The importance of this distinction has been stressed by both Parsons and Chasse. It should be remembered, however, that Marshallian causation is circular and that wants play their role in the process. Marshall's insistence on Octavia Hill's ‘noble sources of joy’, Alfred Marshall's Lectures to Women, ed. Raffaelli, T., Biagini, E. F., and Tullberg, R. McWilliams, Aldershot, 1995Google Scholar; and in general on ‘amenities of life’ (Memorials, p. 344) shows that the way out of ‘the Residuum’ needs a hope-nourishing environment.

³² Raffaelli, T., ‘The Analysis of the Human Mind in the Early Marshallian Manuscripts’, Quaderni di Storia del'Economia Politico, ix (1991), 49–51Google Scholar.

³³ Principles, i. 1.

³⁴ Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 336 and 311.

³⁵ As Whitaker noticed, Parsons ‘failed to come to grips with their logical consistency and interrelations’, ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 464.

³⁶ Besides the footnote in Principles discussed throughout this paper, clear proof of Marshall's acknowledgement of the distinction are his 1874 article ‘The Province of Political Economy’ – ‘direct decisions on questions of moral principles she [political economy] must leave to her sister, the Science of Ethics’, Harrison, , Critical Assessments, iv. 128Google Scholar – and his 1893 speech at the meeting of the British Economic Association – ‘economics was then not utilitarian nor intuitional; she left such questions to be decided by her mistress, Ethics’, ‘Speech’, 389. For other instances of this attitude see Maloney, pp. 197–8.

³⁷ Whitaker, J. K., ‘What Happened to the Second Volume of the Principles? The Thorny Path to Marshall's Last Book’, Centenary Essays on Alfred Marshall, pp. 195 and 217Google Scholar.

³⁸ Harrison, , Critical Assessments, iv. 120Google Scholar; Petridis, 167.

³⁹ See above, n. 36.

⁴⁰ The problem of Marshall's ‘ethical absolutism’ is discussed in Whitaker, , ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 462Google Scholar. I do not think it is solved with his positive answer to its existence. Less questionable is Maloney's statement that Marshall ‘did follow the trend of the time in seeing ethics as a study with pronounced empirical content’ (p. 199).

⁴¹ See Jensen, 23, and Maloney, pp. 167–72 and 183–4.

⁴² ‘Rodomontades’ is his comment on Grote's exhaltation of man's moral freedom.

⁴³ See Becattini, G., ‘Market and Communism in the Thought of Alfred Marshall’, Quaderni di Storia dell'Economia Politico, ix (1991), 161–88Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Sidgwick to Marshall, 1871, Trinity College Library, Add. Ms. c 100.96. The difference between Marshall's views and Sidgwick's sceptical attitude on the impact of evolutionary thought on philosophical subjects is striking, as well documented in Schneewind, J. B., Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, Oxford, 1977Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Early Economic Writings, i. 377. Cf. also the undated statement that ‘ethically it [evolutionism] is the successor of so-called Utilitarianism’, quoted in Maloney, p. 200.

⁴⁶ Though this enthusiasm was dangerously prone to the then usual confusion between natural selection and survival of the fittest, it was still the first to be referred to as ‘the master-key of the universe … [that] among other things … was to give us a new system of ethics, combining the exactness of the Utilitarian with the poetic ideals of the transcendentalist’, Clifford, W. K., Lectures and Essays, ed. Stephen, L. and Pollock, F., London, 1886, pp. 24–5Google Scholar. Besides their personal friendship, evidence of Clifford's influence on Marshall is provided by the latter's collection of magazine articles of the seventies among which Clifford's essays have a prominent place, in Marshall Library of Economics. On Spencer's influence on Marshall cf. also Scott, W. R., ‘Alfred Marshall. 1842–1924’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xi (1924), 449Google Scholar and Memorials, p. 507. The impact of social evolutionism on Marshall dates from an earlier period than the 1880s when, according to Maloney (p. 16), it became influential.

⁴⁷ ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 104; also quoted in Whitaker, , Introduction, Early Economic Writings, i. 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 119.

⁴⁹ Principles, bk. IV, ch. ix.

⁵⁰ ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 122.

⁵¹ Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, x. 467.

⁵² Clifford, pp. 50–2.

⁵³ Whitaker, , ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 455–6 and 470–1Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Stephen, L., The Science of Ethics, London, 1882, p. 368Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 130. For the meaning of the asterisks, cf. ibid., n. 1.

⁵⁶ Principles, i. vi.

⁵⁷ Ibid., i. 243. The ‘indefinite’ borders between selfish and altruistic behaviour, instanced by family affections, had also been noticed by John Grote and this induced Marshall to express for once his unqualified agreement with the Author: ‘this is very characteristic and approaches nearly to grounding altruistic ethics in the instincts of sympathy. Hobbes would approve of it’, Marshall's annotation to Grote, p. 254.

⁵⁸ A revived interest in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as a precursor of some aspects of evolutionary ethics in deriving moral behaviour from sympathy is proved by Darwin's citation of the book; Darwin, C., The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Princeton, 1981, p. 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 17. Moreover, sympathy played a central role in the third edition of Bain, A., The Emotions and the Will, London, 1875Google Scholar, largely revised under the pressure of new evolutionary ideas. Smith is referred to in a footnote of the chapter on sympathy (p. 120). This makes Whitaker's connection of Marshall and Smith less strange than it looks at a first glance, ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 486, n. 87. For Clifford's views, see Clifford, pp. 290–3.

⁵⁹ Principles, i. 17.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Marshall to B. Kidd, 6 June 1894, Marshall Library of Economics.

⁶² Marshall's annotations to Grote, pp. 298–9.

⁶³ Cf. Principles, i. 680.

⁶⁴ While Mill had correctly ‘indicated the centre of the strength of economics when he said that in economic phenomena “the psychological law mainly concerned is the familiar one that a greater gain is preferred to a smaller”,’ Principles, ii. 135–6; quotation from Mill, J. S., A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, bk. VI, ch. ix, §3. Cf. also Memorials, p. 126Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Principles, i. 16.

⁶⁶ Ibid., ii. 144. Cf. also Whitaker, , ‘Some Neglected Aspects’, Critical Assessments, i. 455–6Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Principles, ii. 138.

⁶⁸ Spencer, H., ‘Mill versus Hamilton. The Test of Truth’, Fortnightly Review, i (1865), 531–50Google Scholar; ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 100. Cf. also Introduction, ibid., 73–5.

⁶⁹ ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 135.

⁷⁰ Cf. Jevons, W. S., ‘Helmholtz on the Axioms of Geometry’, Nature, iv (1871), 481–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and von Helmholtz, H., ‘The Axioms of Geometry’, The Academy, iii (1872), 52–3Google Scholar.

⁷¹ In June 1875, during his visit to the American philosopher R. W. Emerson, Marshall asked him whether he knew of ‘Helmholtz's case of beings living on the surface of a sphere’, pointing out the bearing of this on ‘fundamental questions of theology and morality’, quoted in Introduction, ‘Early Philosophical Writings’, 76.

⁷² Ibid.

⁷³ Spencer, H., The Principles of Psychology, London, 1855, p. 578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ On Marshall's rejection of the idea that he was inclined to ‘compromise’, see his letter to Clark, J. B., 24 03 1908 in Memorials, p. 418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ Darwin, pp. 97–8; Spencer, H., Social Statics, London, 1851, pp. 1–3Google Scholar. Cf. also Spencer, H., The Data of Ethics, London, 1879CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ On this, and on Sidgwick's critical attitude to evolutionary ethics, see Schneewind, pp. 384–90.

⁷⁷ Cf. Sidgwick, H., ‘The Theory of Evolution in Its Application to Practice’, Mind, i (1876), 65Google Scholar, where support is derived from a quote from Darwin's Descent of Man, p. 163. Spencer too, however, admitted the benefit of consciously purging evolution of those minor faults which could hide behind major advantages.

⁷⁸ Principles, i. 242.

⁷⁹ Marshall, A., Industry and Trade, London, 1919, p. 175Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Principles, i. 245.

⁸¹ Industry and Trade, p. 594.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 249 and 525.

⁸³ Ibid., pp. 350–4 and bk. Ill, ch. xiv, §8.

⁸⁴ The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ed. , N. and MacKenzie, J., 4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1983, ii. 109Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Industry and Trade, p. 609.

⁸⁶ Memorials, p. 109.

⁸⁷ Industry and Trade, p. 664.

⁸⁸ ‘Those who believe that all commerce of the world will ere long be carried through the air should make a few aeroplanes carry heavy cargoes against the wind before they invite us to blow up our railway bridges’, Memorials, p. 346; written in 1907.

⁸⁹ Industry and Trade, p. 660.

⁹⁰ This is the theme of the lecture on ‘Machinery and Life' that Marshall gave in 1901 at a meeting of the Cambridge Nonconformists’ Union. It develops a parallel between ‘material machinery’ and ‘machinery of thought’. Both exemplify that ‘progress is the development of order’ and, at the same time, that ‘Order is an evil’. Automatisms, absolutely necessary in their place, threateningly tend to come out of their role and to invade the whole of life: ‘too much time in preparation. Too little time in action. Too much scaffolding [,] too little building. Too much machinery[,] too little life’, Marshall Papers, file 4, Marshall Library of Economics; now in Raffaelli, T., ‘Marshall on “Machinery and Life”’, Marshall Studies Bulletin, iv (1994), 9–22Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Industry and Trade, p. 175.

⁹² Once again, there is no sharp contrast, as Marshall states in his comment on Grote's chapter on ‘The Philosophy of Progress’ (p. 279): ‘the opposition between idealism and positivism is invented by Grote: e.g. Comte would say his position was idealistic; but that it had a natural basis in positivism.’

⁹³ ‘Speech’, 389.

⁹⁴ Marshall's autobiographic explanation is precisely that he moved from ethics and psychology to economics because he wanted to know ‘how far the conditions of the British (and other) working classes generally suffice for fullness of life’, Keynes, , ‘Alfred Marshall’, Memorials, p. 10Google Scholar; and felt ‘the increasing urgency of economic studies as a means towards human well-being’, Marshall, to Ward, J., 23 09 1900, Memorials, pp. 418–19Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ A short communication on the same subject was presented at the seminar group on Marshall's Principles of the XXXI Annual Meeting of the Società Italiana degli Economisti, Rome, November 1990. A first version of this paper was presented at the Fourth Conference of The International Society for Utilitarian Studies, Tokyo, August 1994. I thank the participants in those meetings for their comments. Also, I am grateful to J. K. Whitaker and two anonymous referees for their useful criticisms.