ABSTRACT
I Textbook writers on the history of economics usually maintain that British economic thought was dominated by the Cambridge ‘school’ from the first appearance of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics in 1890 until shortly before J.M.Keynes’s General Theory was published in 1936,1 but in attempting to account for this state of affairs they concentrate on the development of analytical (especially Marshallian, or neo-classical) economics and pay insufficient attention to the role of personality, tradition, and the academic and social context. Such an approach not only underestimates important aspects of the intellectual scene; it also neglects the fact that a doctrinal ‘school’ is not merely the product of intellectual influences: it is a sociological phenomenon and, as such, can only be adequately understood by reference to the social situation from which it emerged. This was acknowledged by J.A.Schumpeter, who remarked, in his massive History of Economic Analysis (1954), that
The professionals that devote themselves to scientific work in a particular field…tend to become a sociological group. This means that they have other things in common besides the interest in scientific work or in a particular science per se…. The group accepts or refuses to accept co-workers also for reasons other than their professional competence or incompetence. In economics this group took long to mature but when it did mature it acquired much greater importance than it did in physics…. [In late nineteenth-century England] the association of scientific work with teaching produced an economic profession in a fuller sense of the word and this economic profession developed attitudes to social and political questions that were similar also for reasons other than similar scientific views. This similarity of conditions of life and social location produced similar philosophies of life and similar value judgments about social phenomena.2
