ABSTRACT

A. C. Pigou was a very different kind of economist from Alfred Marshall. Certainly Pigou’s unabashed use of mathematics and graphical methods gave him a theoretical sophistication which in the early years of his professorship was unchallenged in or out of Cambridge. Most of Marshall’s pupils clung tenaciously to the ‘literary’ style of exposition of the Principles, often without the graphical and mathematical footnotes and appendixes with which Marshall had achieved greater precision. It has been seen that Marshall seized the chance to turn value theory into a professional monopoly, that Edgeworth had the chance to do the same for fiscal theory but turned it down, and that Pigou, by 1905, was extending the tentacles of professionalisation towards labour economics. During Marshall’s lifetime, the belief that economics was something both cumulative and incomplete came to dominate the outlook for the dominant school.