Method and Marshall

Economists, or rather some of the most gifted spirits among them, have continued in recent years to conduct a running debate on the more elemental, though by no means more elementary, topic of what sort of a study economics is, and what it is all about. This is a topic which, when I started to read economics at Cambridge in 1910, it was not, I think, fashionable among us to think much about — less fashionable, I dare say, than it may have been a few years previously, when the separate course in economics had not yet been extracted like Eve from the rib of the Moral Sciences Tripos. To us, I think, it seemed a topic more suitable for discussion by Germans than by Englishmen. There was on our reading-list what I have since come to regard as a good, if dry, book about it, J.N. Keynes’s Scope and Method of Political Economy, but to be quite honest I doubt if many of us read it. We thought we knew pretty well what sort of things we wanted to know about, and were glad enough to take the counsel given by Marshall himself near the beginning of the Principles (p. 27),1 ‘the less we concern ourselves with scholastic enquiries whether a certain consideration comes within the scope of economics the better’.2