MARSHALL, ALFRED (1842-1924), British economist, was educated at Merchant Taylors' school and at St. John's col lege, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, being second wran gler in 1865, and elected to a fellowship in the same year. From mathematics he turned to the study of metaphysics, from that to ethics and finally to political economy, to which he himself was later to give the name economics. Having married in 1871, he had to vacate his fellowship, and he accepted the post of first principal of University college, Bristol, where he did a great deal of valuable administrative work, but had to resign in 1881 owing to ill-health. From 1883-85 he was a fellow and lecturer in po litical economy at Balliol college, Oxford; in the latter year he returned to Cambridge as professor of political economy in suc cession to Henry Fawcett. He was a member of the royal com mission on labour from 1891-94 and subsequently rendered im portant services to a number of Government enquiries. In 1903, after years of struggle, he succeeded in calling into being an economics tripos at Cambridge, separate and distinct from the moral sciences tripos. He retired from the chair of political econ omy in 1908 and thenceforward gave himself up entirely to his writings until his death in Marshall published the Principles of Economics in 1890, his first big work, and in many ways his most important contribution to economic literature. His next volume Industry and Trade, a realistic study of industrial organization, did not appear until 1918, but in the meanwhile he had devoted much time and energy to bringing out successive editions of his Principles. In 1923 he published his last volume, Money, Credit and Commerce. Mar shall may be said to have been in the lineal descent of the great English economists—Adam Smith, Ricardo and J S. Mill. Like their chief works, his Principles of Economics has become a classic.
It was distinguished by its profound and systematic methods of analysis, and by the introduction of a number of new concepts, such as elasticity of demand, consumer's surplus, quasi-rent, the representative firm, etc., which have played a great role in the subsequent development of economics. Writing at a time when the economic world was hopelessly divided on the theory of value, he succeeded, largely by introducing the element of time as a factor in analysis, in reconciling the classical cost of production principle with the marginal utility principle formulated by Jevons and the Austrian school. He did much to rescue economics from the rigid dogmatism, which had alienated so many of the best minds of the 19th century, by insisting that economic reasoning and laws were not themselves a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth.
Although so many years elapsed between the publication of the Principles of Economics and that of his next two works, much that was most important in them, especially in regard to the theory of money, had been transmitted orally in his lectures at Cam bridge, and had appeared in the evidence which he gave before the gold and silver commission in 1887 and the Indian currency com mission in 1899. In this way he had influenced thought far out side the confines of Cambridge, not only in England but also in foreign countries.
While Marshall never set himself to found a school of eco nomic doctrine, his genius for stimulating the minds of a long succession of pupils, and the example of his methods of reasoning, have had a profound effect upon the development of economics in England, the United States, and many European countries.
(C. W. G.)