ABSTRACT
Marshall described his Principles of Economics (1890) as “an attempt to present a modern version of old doctrines with the aid of new work, and with reference to the new problems of our age.” This description was, in many ways, an unfortunate introduction to that great work, which became the fountain-head for the tradition of neoclassicism. It was unfortunate because it obscured the time sequence of his own intellectual development. His work on the theory of value and distribution was practically completed in the years 1867-70, when he translated Mill’s version of Ricardo’s doctrines into mathematics. In a letter written to J.B. Clark in 1908 Marshall noted: “Between 1870 and 1874 I developed the details of my theoretical position and I am not conscious of any perceptible change since the time Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser were still lads at school.”1 But the long delay before the publication of the Principles virtually denied Marshall’s claim to priority in the discovery of many economic truths associated with him.2 It was also unfortunate for a second reason: it reflected Marshall’s dissatisfaction with a book that was already the product of 20 years’
labor. He spent of much of the next 30 years making relatively minor changes and refinements in a work that went through eight editions during his lifetime, but which was essentially the same work he had laid out mentally no later than the 1870s and, certainly, no later than the publication of Jevons’s work.
