ABSTRACT
Thought, action and event, history and novelty are the face of time. Alfred Marshall shows how the detailed content of the notion of cost and of supply-price depends on the circumstances of the intended production in its aspects of time. His long-period supply curve is useful only ex post, as a record and statement of the path of expansion which some firm has actually followed. He sought, with limitless patience, high practical wisdom, resolute realism and subtle innovation to spin together into a serviceable thread of thought, the mutually repellent strands of rationality and novelty. He worked in the immediate glow of the Darwinian revolution of thought, and at a time when Britain led the world in technological advance. Insisting on the continuity of change, he shows how it can be dissected into stages each having its own unity and rationale.
