Getting Marshall ‘Out of the Way’

In the previous chapter, attention was focused on Piero Sraffa’s well- known critique of ‘Marshall’s theory’, as it related to the treatment of increasing returns and long-period equilibrium. It was concluded that Sraffa’s critique, while fundamentally challenging the orthodoxy of his time, in fact had very little direct relevance to ‘Marshall’s theory’. Sraffa’s position was reflective of a much wider misinterpretation of the method and content of Marshall’s analysis and the intended nature and role of equilibrium in particular. As such, Sraffa’s contributions illustrated the extent to which the Marshallians had departed from the engine of inquiry that Marshall had attempted to construct. The most obvious ‘casualty’ of the Marshallian reconstruction was Marshall’s economic biology ‘Mecca’. In this chapter, attention is directed towards the Marshallian responses to Sraffa’s critique.