Stitching things together. Marshall on the economy as an ‘organic whole’

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss Marshall’s use of metaphors in his understanding of cyclical movements and crises in the economy. While much of the literature on Marshall’s reliance on biological metaphors has focused on its substantive significance for his theories, I will concentrate on their methodological importance. I will argue that Marshall’s use of biological metaphors made him steer away from Jevons’s search for mechanical principles to understand economic cycles (as discussed by Michael White in this volume). Instead, Marshall relied on his organicist understanding of the economy as a complex interconnected whole. For his understanding of business cycles, this did not mean that Marshall attempted to understand cycles by an explicit transfer of concepts from the realm of biology to economics, a strategy highlighted by some of the contributions to this volume, but that Marshall searched for a method that would do justice to the complexity and interconnectedness of phenomena that the realm of economics shared with biology. Indeed, as argued by Limoges and Ménard (2004), Marshall was conscious that ‘economics is not biology,’ but shared its complexity as an interconnected whole. I will then investigate how Marshall’s understanding of the economy as an interconnected whole made him search for ways of studying the economy that would do justice to the motto of Industry and Trade: ‘The One in the Many and the Many in the One.’