ABSTRACT
Marshall was writing in Victorian England. Free trade, the spirit of uninhibited individualism and free enterprise, and the glories of an im mensely successful industrial revolution dominated the perceptions of ob servers and commentators of the economic scene. Dissident economists abounded, it is true: Karl Marx and a long line of socialists vied for recog nition, but they were dismissed as either gadflies or eccentrics and, in any event, had little impact on the regular body of economic thought. Most
people in the United States as well as in England were too optimistic for the future, too self-satisfied with a sense of the success of their past, to pay much heed to critics. They favored instead, and were eager to believe, the neoclassicist’s explanation of the operation of the market system, and by so doing gave the system an intellectual respectability and presence, a form of permanence and reality, that still persists-long after its basis in reality has largely ceased to exist.
