ABSTRACT
It is not difficult to link the names of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall in discussions of the history of economics. Reviewers of Marshall’s Principles in 1890 did so on numerous occasions, the outstanding example being the review published in the Edinburgh Review (Anonymous 1891). Even the year of 1890 implies a link between the two economists. It marked the centenary of Adam Smith’s death as well as the ‘birth’ of Marshall’s Principles. (In the summer of 1990 I was therefore able to accommodate a visit to Edinburgh to commemorate the bicentenary of Smith’s death in between a Royal Economic Society meeting to celebrate the centenary of Marshall’s Principles and that held in the Marshall Room of the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge University for an international gathering of Marshall scholars.) George Stigler linked the two as authors of the greatest books on economics ever written, without ever unambiguously committing himself as to which was the superior, and while generously noting the significant errors (or ‘failures’) they perpetrated in their magnificent texts.
