In common with contemporary economists of comparable stature—notably, Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto—Alfred Marshall had a hankering to cover the entire field of the science of society as he conceived it with a series of voluminous tomes calling for a lifetime's work. With such ambitious plans, the risk of failure was all too real, as is confirmed by the brief summary of Marshall's publishing history provided in the opening pages of this volume. Leaving aside Marshall's previous attempts, the story begins in 1890 when the Principles of Economics, volume 1, was published. He intended to follow it with a second volume dealing with specific themes, the last of which was, as he put it in the preface to the sixth edition (1910), “the ideal and the practicable in social and economic structure” (Marshall 1961, 2:56). However, in this same edition, the inscription “Vol. 1” was dropped from the title page and the idea of a second volume gave way to that of a series of two or three independent volumes. The first of these, Industry and Trade, came out in 1919 with Marshall still in full command of his powers. Nevertheless, the second, Money Credit and Commerce, published in 1923, already showed signs of incipient senility. By then, “the ideal and the practicable” was still at the stage of a mass of disjointed material accumulated over the last few decades, with a few outlines, plans for a table of contents, and a title: “Economic Progress: Possibilities of the Economic Future.” However, the power to assemble the whole and produce a synthesis had gone. “I have no intention of writing anything new,” he announced to Macmillan in December 1922, “but I am lazily collecting various selected essays &c for publication after my death, if not before” (Whitaker 1996: 386). “Sanitized” by Marshall himself, and possibly by Mary Paley and Arthur Cecil Pigou after his death (as Marshall's biographer Peter Groenewegen surmises), for years this material moldered in boxes in the basement of the Marshall Library from which many have picked out fragments here and there but nobody has ever tried to piece together a picture of what might have been Marshall's conclusive volume of the series begun with the Principles.Katia Caldari and Tamotsu Nishizawa, two distinguished specialists in the field of Marshall studies, have done precisely that. Thanks to their patient work of reconstruction we can now read an ample selection of these fragments assembled and organized so as to come as close as possible to something like a preliminary draft of the never-materialized volume. This does not mean that what we find here can be considered as reflecting the project Marshall had in mind, for it had probably never taken on any definite form. Caldari and Nishizawa are quite clear that in the choice and arrangement of the material they followed Marshall's more or less vague indications as far as possible, but were also guided by their modern sensibility in identifying the issues more likely to resonate with our current concerns.The publishing vicissitudes recalled above are important to locate these texts in their author's life and epoch. Contrary to what one might expect, the author is not the frail old sage with a black cap looking to Plato's Republic for guidance, as portrayed by Keynes in the closing pages of his biographical essay, but a self-confident, middle-aged professional who mistrusts the ideally perfect worlds of social utopias because they “might be rather dull, and perhaps even a little stagnant in spite of the best intentions” (35). We are not in the early 1920s, in a world still ravaged by the war and Europe seething with strife of all sorts, but prewar Britain facing the labor conflicts of the late nineteenth century, the beginnings of the tendency to combination and monopoly in key sectors of the American and German industry, and escalating international tensions over trade, protection, and tariffs. Consequently, in the volume we find scant concession to the spiritualist kitsch of the “kinship with the Spirit of the universe” kind (355), and much matter-of-fact speculation on how a government, especially the British government, should deal with trade unions, wages, trusts and cartels, taxation, and duties and tariffs— pieces of work suspended, most of it going back to Marshall's activity as an expert and commissioner for official inquiries in the decades around the turn of the century. The nearest he comes to postwar problems is where he touches on revolutionary syndicalism (387n761), guild socialism (34), and discrimination in import duties (295–300). But nothing is found on the Soviet experiment, German reparations, or other such momentous issues of the epoch.When he speaks of progress from an economist's point of view Marshall is of course speaking of the very long period, which means, as Caldari and Nishizawa remind us, removing from the economic argument all kinds of ceteris paribus clauses, including what he calls the “character” of the people of a country and the state of its industrial organization. The coevolution of these two items, the reciprocal adaptation of the prevailing moral attitudes and the existing patterns of division of labor in a changeable environment—on reflection, the very core of Marshall's lifelong research—takes over and becomes the decisive criterion to judge the possibilities of progress. Progress is inclusion of an increasing share of the population into the circle of those who are allowed to enjoy the pleasures of a life “full [and] strong” (344), pleasures that come from command over material requisites as well as from the “capacity for feeling and for thought.” It requires morality and industry to coevolve so as to afford ever-more people an “increase of material wealth . . . united with solidity of character sufficient to turn it to good account” (31). “Solidity of character,” we understand from other passages, means focusing on “self-respect” in all one's activities, that is, on their conformity to values conceived as universal, an attitude that is “turned to good account” when it is also applied to labor, investing it with a moral dimension that transforms it from means to other satisfactions into a source of satisfaction in itself. Thus, capacity to enjoy and capacity to produce for enjoyment can expand at the same pace, and progress can develop as a self-sustaining process. In line with the wave of idealism that swept through intellectual Britain in the last quarter of the century, Marshall's idea of progress merges into one of liberation from slavery to work through transformation of the latter into an end in itself—a process that in his early writings and in the Principles he related to the realization of Hegelian “objective freedom.”“Progress has many sides” (30), and many are the problematic turning points at which the process can bog down. A main concern in these notes is the “creativity” of work, an essential characteristic that is responsible for both the joy that comes from labor well done and the growth of productivity on which the flow of material requisites of progress depends. Creativity implies risky experiments and requires a system of incentives to regulate it in a socially efficient way. In the 1890s, Marshall saw the problem as one of positioning the British economy in a trade-off between the large scale of the American and German models of industrial organization and the moderate scale of the traditional British “small master” (197–98). The former exploits internal economies but stifles innovation under layers of routine and standardization, while the latter stimulates it but is at a disadvantage in other aspects of the trade. Here we get a clear idea of the underlying reasons for Marshall's enduring hostility to Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Fabian socialism. The Webbs have an a priori preference for large production units and “exaggerate the evils of small master-dom and understate its benefit with . . . extravagant bias, and limitation of knowledge” (129–30, 138–39). They advocate collectivization of capital in large public organizations, but to Marshall this is even worse, because what is difficult for a manager of a big joint stock company is almost impossible for a public bureaucrat (104, 188, 393). His idea is that private ownership of capital must be preserved insofar as it provides a just balance of incentives for responsible risk-taking, making for an efficient exploitation of the socially available innovative capacity (144). The latter, being based on an “originating faculty,” relies on the existence of “a high order of individuality” in society. Hence, the best environment for progress is one that combines private capital in moderate lumps and a moral attitude favorable to the “free growth of individuality” (335–36).Individualism does not imply rejection of social organicism, and here as elsewhere Marshall warns us against this false contraposition. Society is for him a tangled network of externalities operating at various levels of aggregation, from the individual business unit to the country as a whole, as he explains on pages 92–93. This is the source of many instances of nonseparability, among which he points out the impossibility of ascertaining the contribution of each individual agent, be it worker or capitalist, to social production (94), and even the individual reliability or creditworthiness of an agent as distinct from “trust in the character of society” (341). This suggests a possible justification for an active economic role by the government, because, in the face of such indivisibilities, the market proves an imperfect distributive mechanism (see, e.g., 106–7, 383–84) and public authority may help individuals to settle their social obligations to their fellows by means of redistributive taxation (209). Indeed, this is perhaps the only point on which there is some agreement between Marshall and the socialists—the belief that there is too much unjustified inequality of wealth in society and that the government should do its best to try to correct it. As always, though, Marshall's support for public intervention is rather half-hearted. It is a temporary remedy, made necessary by a sort of moral confusion concerning the nature of the incentives that drive businessmen to perform their creative tasks; but in a conceivably more ethical society the accumulation of enormous private wealth would no longer be the main incentive (374–76), and the need for fiscal redistribution would become correspondingly less urgent. “Utopia does not require a Government” (354), he says in a moment of utopian exuberance. Which may be taken to mean that in his view no collective institution should be allowed to take the place of the internalization of sociality within individual conscience or, in other words, that sociality cannot be an imposition.To sum up this position politically, the only possible term is social liberalism, or, in the language of the time, “New Liberalism.” His liberalism, however, is more a pragmatist's than an idealist's. He does toy with the Hegelian language of subjective/objective freedom, as we saw above, and is clearly fond of the Ruskinian “no wealth but life” motto, reechoed in various contexts (345–46, 372). However, he never forgets the naturalistic and utilitarian dimension in which the liberation process that he calls “progress” develops. In a much-quoted passage, he insists on progress as a result of “the strongest, and not merely the highest, forces of human nature” (Marshall 1919: 664). Here, he emphasizes that the elevation of character “from savagery to a high state” is not an approximation to a metaphysical perfection à la Thomas Hill Green but a result of “serious strenuous work as a condition of race survival” (346–47). Other ways of developing character are conceivable, he says, such as “the sudden, but evanescent, bursts of high thought and enterprise, of which Greek history is the most brilliant instance.” Nevertheless, “idealism should underpin all that we do, but not be put into the front”; and one should reject the idea that “a brilliant explosion of gas is a substitute for hard patient work” (350).A wealth of thought-provoking topics is to be found in these pages. As those who are acquainted with Marshall's manuscripts know, he can be a much more engrossing writer than appears from his often overwritten published texts. Most of these fragments are jotted down in lively, spontaneous prose, ideologically candid, always acute, and at times paradoxical. We must be grateful to Caldari and Nishizawa for bringing back to life this source of knowledge of the past and intellectual stimulus for our times.
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