ABSTRACT
The late 1920s and early 1930s saw considerable activity amongst economists concerned with competitive structures and the “firm.” Much of this work may be interpreted as an attack on Marshall’s treatment of the subject with a view to replacing it by a more “rigorous” and formal analysis. But E.H. Chamberlin to a very large extent stands apart from these developments, as he makes plain in the “Origin and Early Development of Monopolistic Competition Theory” (1961). Serious work on his thesis apparently began in 1924, was largely completed in 1926, and the study filed in the following year. This means, for example, that Chamberlin’s “discovery” of the curves of marginal cost and marginal revenue was made quite independently of his English and German colleagues. Further, as Chamberlin himself made clear, “Nor did the Book itself attack Marshall…on any of the issues involved” (ibid.: 532). Indeed, he always insisted that his work was an attack “not on Marshall but on the theory of perfect competition” (ibid.: 540). He might have added that Monopolistic Competition is essentially Marshallian both in its style of reasoning and in the preoccupation with realism; a preoccupation which led
Chamberlin to play down the operational significance of the marginal curves while recognizing their importance in a technical sense (1957:274-76).
