ABSTRACT
In the 1920s in the international economic literature, and principally on the pages of The Economic Journal, many economists were involved in a long debate on the Marshallian theory of value and competition: known as ‘the controversy on costs’, it contributed substantially to the foundation of the contemporary theories of value and competition. Schumpeter wrote that this debate was a ‘striking instance of the slowness and roundaboutness of analytical advance’ (Schumpeter 1954:1048). This feature is not strange if we know that, especially in the English speaking countries, in that debate the core of economics in its most diffused version was at stake. As is well known in England, the period between 1895 and 1914 is known as ‘the Marshallian Age’ and in the perhaps most prestigious university of the world of that time, Cambridge, ‘Marshall was economies’, as Joan Robinson effectively said. In any case, the relevant intellectual effort produced in that period of theoretical invention deeply influenced successive developments in economic theory: this fact justifies the recurrent interest of the economists and the historians of economics in that period.
