ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: VEBLEN’S READING OF MARSHALL’S WORK
Author: Foresti Tiziana
The aim of this paper is to examine Thorstein Veblen’s interpretation of Marshall. I shall try to place Veblen’s statements on Marshall’s work in the context of his theoretical system. In the years 1898 - 1901 Veblen launched his challenge to orthodox economics. He attacked the theoretic hard core of the neo-classical paradigm with great clarity and precision and pointed to Marshall as the spokesman of the new orthodoxy. In Veblen’s perspective, Marshall’s Principles of Economics were representative of a pre –evolutionary (taxonomic) economics, thus his criticism of Marshall’s work was closely related to the issue of the epistemological status of modern economics. Although Veblen recognized that Marshall shared the “general evolutionary attitude” of their time, he dismissed his Principles as a system of economic taxonomy with an “air evolutionism”. More specifically, Marshall’s analysis was not an “inquiry into institutional development” since it was “directed to determination of the conditions of an equilibrium”. However, as already suggested by Niman (1998) and Raffaelli (1998, 2003), there are some similarities between Veblen’s and Marshall’s ideas. In very broad terms, they share criticism of the classical school, the belief that economics needs an evolutionary approach, and a deep-rooted conviction that businessmen may not always act in the best interests of society. It must, nevertheless, be noted that both of them did not grasp such commonalities. Thus I shall try to investigate the reasons for this misunderstanding.
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