ABSTRACT
At first glance it is a little surprising to find Alfred Marshall putting himself forward as a social reformer. Even the most casual acquaintance with his mature writings suggests that the reformist element is subdued and that any youthful sympathy for socialist aims was soon abandoned. But it would be wrong to pigeonhole him as a doctrinaire conservative intellectually, or even as a practicing Conservative politically-if anything his political sympathies seem to have lain with the Liberal party, although he was careful to remain above the political fray and maintain an aura of magisterial impartiality.2 As Donald Winch, writing of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, justly remarks;
Any differences…between socialists and liberal economists at this time were not so much conceptual as practical; they concerned the extensiveness and seriousness of contemporary abuses, and the pace at which society could be made to move towards new forms of social organisation without attendant loss of benefit from the old. It was only in the context of a debate of this kind that Marshall must be accounted a conservative.
