ABSTRACT
My paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the nature of the neo-classical developments of the 1870s, particularly the legitimacy of the term ‘revolution’, which implies analytical discontinuity, as a valid description of those developments. This representation has become particularly topical, since the notion of a neo-classical or marginalist economics, contrasting sharply in analytical essentials with Ricardian classicism, constitutes a central theme of the historiography of the modern Cambridge (UK) School. The evidence discussed in this paper suggests, on the contrary, how useful in the present context is the notion of altered ‘concentrations of attention’ (Hicks 1976, 208-9), which avoids a revolutionary connotation. For what seems to have occurred in the 1870s was a narrowing of focus, specifically a greater concern with exchange and allocation in their own right; a sharpening of theoretical tools, particularly those relating to consumer choice; and the algebraic formulation of general-equilibrium relationships. These are developments which could have been absorbed by the traditional corpus of analysis, whereas the impatience of the marginalists and their apparent wish to wipe the slate clean meant that much of great import in classical theory for their own chosen and relatively narrow sphere of discourse was not recognized, and spurious analytical distinctions were artificially reinforced. My evidence, in short, suggests how justified 136was Marshall's insistence, against both Jevons and Walras, upon the essential continuity of nineteenth-century doctrine: ‘Under the honest belief that Ricardo and his followers had rendered their account of the causes that determine value hopelessly wrong by omitting to lay stress on the law of satiable wants, [Jevons] led many to think he was correcting great errors; whereas he was really only adding very important explanations’ (Marshall 1920, 101n). Indeed Marshall found Ricardo's formulation of pricing preferable to that of Jevons, who ‘substitutes a catena of causes for mutual causation’ (818). Gerald Shove's estimate of four decades ago stands the test of time:
the analytical backbone of Marshall's Principles is nothing more nor less than a completion and generalization, by means of a mathematical apparatus, of Ricardo's theory of value and distribution as expounded by J.S. Mill. It is not… a conflation of Ricardian notions with those of the ‘marginal utility’ school. Nor is it an attempt to substitute for Ricardian doctrine a new system of ideas arrived at by a different line of approach. … [So] far as its strictly analytical content is concerned, the Principles is in the direct line of descent through Mill from Ricardo.
(Shove 1960 [1942], 712)