Alfred Marshall Essay

The chief achievement of the Principles is his working out of the economics of the stationary State. He claimed to have independently discovered the marginal utility theory, though typically he did not publish until he had fully integrated this into his system. His welfare economics was of central importance since his decision to take up economics originated in a moral purpose, and his general conclusion was that a redistribution of income from rich to poor would increase total satisfaction. Keynes was among his pupils and the `Keynesian revolution' can be seen as remaining within the Marshallian tradition.
The last edition of Alfred Marshall Principles of Economics appeared in 1920, his final presentation of a course of thought of which successive editions during four decades had recorded the widening and deepening process. The very fact that a difficult treatise in systematic economics, a volume of 858 pages, totalling not far short of 400,000 words, could have arrived at an eighth edition, sufficiently attests the wide acceptance and unexampled influence of Marshall's thought. It is probably well within the truth to assert that the authority of Marshall has been for several decades, and still remains, supreme among the economists of the English-speaking world. This Eighth Edition reports, then, not only the latest but the most