ABSTRACT

The technical orthodoxy which underlay professionalism drew most of its supporters from a fairly narrow ideological base. If economics has typical and untypical branches, welfare economics is one of the latter. Its conclusions cannot be tested. Its evaluations are often arbitrary and based on very partial evidence. Alfred Marshall's conception of welfare economics was highly quantitative. The verdict on Marshall’s writings on welfare economics must be that they are theoretically unsatisfactory and practically inconclusive. The liberal economist’s dilemma was that he could not make fully commensurable, much less resolve, the perpetual confrontation between two mutually vulnerable adversaries: the equalising implications of Benthamism, hard and precise yet brittle and dogmatic, and his own personal experience, moral attitudes and political convictions. Marshall, then, simplified the accepted economic criteria to be applied to radical social proposals, stressed their similarities and subsumed them under as few headings as possible.