The British economist Alfred Marshall is one of the greatest political economists of all times and this book represents a deep effort to address in an orderly way the many social and economical issues that were at stake at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. This way of addressing disturbing social questions is an Alfred Marshall trademark.

In this sense, his motto could well be the oft quoted ” Natura non facit saltum” , which is Latin for “Nature does not evolves in leaps and bounds”, and all things are going to be all right in the future but it will take some time untill they consolidate themselves into a coherent whole, where everyone in this world will have an opportunity to fully develop his natural propensities for love, companionship and free will. His view is helped by the many mathematical formulae he uses to illustrate his points of views, using differential calculus, due to his mathematical background. But the reader has not to worry if he/she is not proficient with this type of mathematical tools, because they are used only as a side-line to the text, which is dense and full of logical thinking in itself. Marshall, despite his mathematical background, didn’t judge Mathematics as a fundamental tool to Politcal Economy.

Alfred Marshall is the most influential representant of the minimalist movement called Neo-Classics Economics (Stanley Jevons, Vilfredo Pareto , Karl Menger) and in this capacity is the most notorius proponent of what today is taught and learned in all Economics Schools over the world as Microeconomics, or the economics of particular competitive or non-competitive markets. In some way, he is both the inheritor of the Utilitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham, as of the economics doctrines of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. Also, one of the interesting facets of Marshall is that he had both John Neville Keynes (the father) and John Maynard Keynes (the son) as one of his pupils in Economics.

His knowledge of History and Mathematics is astounding and if he has not reached the status of Keynes or Adam Smith, this is more due to the constraints of the Victorian era in which he wrote this book, and the influences he received, than to any lack of deep understanding of economics realities, which were indeed recognized by John Maynard Keynes himself as fundamental to the latter development he gave to the so-called Dismall Science.

Zip file of the entire book (201MB)