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The present position of economics, an inaugural lecture
The present position of economics an inaugural lecture Author:Alfred Marshall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: put forward not at all as independent truths, but as the outcome of particular illustrations of a scientific method of inquiry. Much as Ricardo and his chief fol... more »lowers are to be blamed for what they omitted to do, they have not committed, to the extent that is generally supposed, the fault of claiming universality and necessity for their doctrines. But they did not make their drift obvious. They did not make clear to others, it was not even quite clear to themselves, that what they were building up was not universal truth, but machinery of universal application in the discovery of a certain class of truths. This is the main point on which I wish to insist to-day. § 8. Adam Smith is most widely known for his argument, that Government does harm by interfering in trade. While admitting that self-interest often led the individual trader to act injuriously to the community, he thought that Government even with the best intentions nearly always served the public worse than the enterprise of the individual trader, however selfish he might happen to be. This doctrine it is which most German writers havechiefly in view when they speak of Smithianismus. But it was not his chief work. His chief work was to indicate the manner in which value measures human motive. Possibly the full drift of what he was doing was not seen by him, certainly it was not perceived by many of his followers who approached economics from the point of view of business rather than of philosophy. But for all that, the best economic work which came after the Wealth of Nations is distinguished from that which went before, by a clearer insight into the balancing and weighing, by means of money, of the desire for the possession of a thing on the one hand, and on the other of all the various efforts and self-denials wh...« less