Here is a first draft of a section of a new book I am starting:

	Marshall was not the first to advocate a more rigorous analysis of the 
economy.  However, nobody before Marshall ever matched his obsession 
with reconstituting academic political economy as the supposedly 
scientific discipline of economics.
	Marshall's project of recasting economics as a science grew out of his 
deep resentment of the fact that anybody could pretend to be competent 
to recommend policy decisions based on political    regardless of 
academic training.  This problem came to a head in 1869, after William 
Gladstone, by virtue of his position as Prime Minister, appointed Sir 
John Robert Seeley to the Regius Professorship in Modern History.
	In his Inaugural Lecture, Seeley emphasized the policy role of the 
chair, convinced that political economy fell within the scope of his 
discipline of history (Groenewegen 1995, p. 129).  At first, Marshall 
embraced Seeley's vision, immersing himself in historical research.  By 
1885, when Marshall gave his own Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, he had 
undergone a conversion (Marshall 1885).
	By then, Marshall had become disdainful of the historical method.  Only 
with the guidance of economic theory could any sense be made of 
historical knowledge.  Marshall was appalled that people without 
training in economics.  How could a mere historian aspire to speak about 
weighty matters of political economy?
                              ... facts by themselves are silent. 
Observation discovers nothing directly of the actions of causes, but 
only of sequences in time.  It may find that an event followed on, or 
that it coincided with, a certain group of other events.  But this gives 
no guidance ....
			Experience in controversies ... brings out the impossibility of 
learning anything from facts till they are examined and interpreted by 
reason; and teaches that the most reckless and treacherous of all 
theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for 
themselves, who keeps in the background the part he has played, perhaps 
unconsciously, in selecting and grouping them, and in suggesting the 
argument post hoc ergo propter hoc.  [Marshall 1885, pp. 167 68]
Greedy then as the economists must be for facts, he must not be content 
with mere facts ....  He will thus work in light of facts, but the light 
will not be thrown directly, it will be reflected and concentrated by 
science.  [Marshall 1885, p. 171]

According to one student of Marshall's career, his "first and paramount 
objective" was that ... economists ... be trained in a body of knowledge 
which    without excessive grief    he recognised would be inaccessible 
to laymen" (Maloney 1985, pp. 3 and 2).  These economic specialists "who 
announced their monopoly of occupational competence" were able to 
"secure, on the basis of their claims, the right to decide whom to train 
and not to train for the occupation, and in what to train them" (Maloney 
1985, p. 4).
	To make political economy seem more scientific, Marshall, who was born 
a year after Jane Austen wrote about her non academic economists, 
Marshall began using the term, "economics," in part because it suggested 
an affinity with physics.  Marshall was not the first economist to use 
the term, "economics," in the title of a major treatise.  Authors of 
lesser known works, such as those of J. M. Sturtevant (1877) and H. D. 
Macleod (1878), preceded him in that respect (see Arndt 1984), but their 
works had little impact.  In contrast, Marshall was largely responsible 
for renaming the subject.
	Once economics became inaccessible to ordinary people only those who 
had undergone formal training in economics    the priesthood of 
economics    could communicate the truths of the discipline to the 
unwashed masses.  The underlying basis of such truths was of no concern 
to ordinary people, who were expected to take the world of the 
economists on faith.
	To make matters worse, Marshall made another move.  In addition to 
changing "economy" to "economics," he removed the "political" from 
"political economy."  Marshall and his wife, Mary, writing in their 
Economics of Industry, explained that their motive:  "... political 
interests generally mean the interest of some part or parts of the 
nation" rather than the nation as a whole (Marshall and Marshall 1879, 
p. 2).  Economics, in contrast, was above the world of political 
interests, standing as the true science of making decisions in the best 
interest of everybody.  Anybody who questioned economists' 
pronouncements could be presumed to have some nefarious motives.
	Unfortunately, the notion of excluding the political from political 
economy was disingenuous.  In the early world of academic economics, the 
meaning of politics became distorted to mean anything that challenged 
the prevailing economic interests.  As a result, the politics of the 
status quo remained protected, hidden from view under a cloak of 
pretended objectivity.  In this way, economists could pride themselves 
on the virtue of their scientific approach, while allowing those with 
money and power to generally remain immune from any critical analysis.
	The scientific pretensions of economics hobbled the discipline even 
further, once economists attempted to emulate natural sciences by making 
their work ever more mathematical.  Over time, the increasing extent of 
abstraction in economic theory created a widening gulf between academic 
economics and the real world.  All too often, what remained was a 
brilliant, but sterile display of virtuosity that could win the acclaim 
of fellow economists.
	Alfred Marshall may have realized the damage that he had done.  He said 
to his wife, shortly before his death, after dinner on Christmas Day 
1923: "If I had to live my life over again, I should have devoted it to 
Psychology.  Economics has too little to do with ideals" (Groenewegen 
1995, p. 729).  But the damage had already been done.


Michael Perelman