A Book That Never Was: Marshall’s Final Volume on Progress and His System of Ethical and Political Beliefs

Abstract

For Marshall, the possibilities of economic and social progress with their prospects for the elimination of human poverty, had been one of the motives which took him from philosophical studies during the second half of the 1860s to the pursuit of economic studies. This emphasis on progress and ideals stayed in his thoughts and plans for study for the whole of the good half-century which remained of his life at the start of the 1870s. The projected volume on economic progress he especially contemplated from the start of the 1920s marks the final episode in this life-long endeavour. This paper reflects on material preserved on the intended ‘final volume’ on economic progress as a book that never was, guided by the political, social and ethical ideas that had originally driven Marshall to economics and which, in brief, were encapsulated in the chapter added for the final editions of his most famous work. The first part of the paper examines the fragments preserved on that intended companion volume on progress, filling out detail, where possible, from Book VI chapter XIII of the Principles. Part II then links these contents to Marshall’s political and social beliefs visible in what he later described as his youthful tendency to socialism, which was gradually transformed to a New Liberal position of his long lifetime. A final section presents some conclusions.