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