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A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall, 1842-1924. By Peter Groenewegen. Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. xiv, 874, index. $89.95.
Peter Groenewegen's biography of Marshall arrives with substantial advance praise and promise to fulfill a surprising lacuna in the history of economic thought. Groenewegen delivers in fine style with a literally encyclopedic volume. About one-sixth of the book reviews Marshall's childhood and education. Marshall undertook economics in the service of a social conscience that led him to want to master the principles of the subject matter to which so many appealed in their pessimism about the plight of the less fortunate. This search for the path of social improvement seems rather common in the Victorian age and is related at least in part to a crisis brought about by the perceived erosion of religious belief by the scientific principles of the day [pp. 113-18]. Marshall's insistence upon the historical and inductive grounding of economics reflects this emphasis on the social utility of economic analysis [p. 759].
Marshall's apprenticeship in economics in the critical years of 1867-1875 is given focused attention [ch. 6] because of its pivotal importance to the Marshall we know in economics. J.S. Mill's work is not surprisingly of great importance in Marshall's apprenticeship, but the works of Smith, Cournot, von Thunen, and...