ABSTRACT
Edwin Cannan and Joseph Shield Nicholson have enough in common to make two full-length portraits a superfluity in the present context. But both were interesting and influential men who deserve more than thumbnail sketches. In his own lectures at the London School of Economics, Cannan explicitly eschewed not only the professorial behaviour lampooned, but also anything purporting to penetrate to the ‘essence’ of rent, interest or wages. One feels that Cannan himself would have been only too happy to see his own economic apprentices blowing their noses on embroidered Alfred Marshalls. Cannan’s simplicity and force earned him a wide readership. Writing to Cannan in 1918, he inveighed against ‘the Marshallians and the Pigouese’ whose attempts to make ‘the great truths of political economy’ mathematical had merely made them ‘unintelligible or vapid’. ‘Historical Progress and Ideal Socialism’, read to the British Association in 1894 and then printed separately, was Nicholson’s most sustained attack on socialism.
