ABSTRACT
The ‘marginalism controversy’ in economics is commonly regarded to be well-documented. And yet there is an aspect to the controversy, I venture, that has received relatively little attention. Both adversaries in the controversy advanced selection arguments to underline their position. In this chapter, I shall focus on these arguments. It is not my aim to give a balanced ‘final’ judgement as to what side had the better arguments. I shall rather attempt to arrive at a thorough understanding of what the economists involved were up to. In particular, I shall argue that we can learn several things about the economists’ own understanding of marginalism from considering the selection arguments that were put forward by the marginalists. Far from being mere afterthoughts, designed to defend marginal analysis against antimarginalist criticisms in an ad hoc way, these arguments reveal basic background beliefs of marginalists about the way market economies function.
