ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the professionalisation of British economics during the decades after 1870 through the eyes of the man who dominated it for most of those years. Alfred Marshall was kept in economics by more than just a sense of his own ignorance. The contradiction between analytical and social ends pervaded Marshall’s career. ‘The economist must stand fast by science’ was the message of Marshall’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. The more analytical parts of the Principles were Marshall’s monument to the natural-science conception of economics. In 1898 Marshall proclaimed economic biology as ‘the Mecca of economic science’. Marshall the paternalist moralist also found his voice in economic biology. Marshall had little patience with the view that any significant redistribution of income would be followed by a dark age of drink before higher working-class tastes arrived to justify higher working-class incomes.
