From Ancients and Moderns to Geography and Anthropology: The Meaning of History in the Thought of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall

Abstract

Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the changing status of history within political economy. This article illustrates that claim by way of a survey of the place of history in the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall. It identifies a sea change in historical thought after the French Revolution, such that Smith's basic contrast of modern with ancient society was replaced in the thought of both Marx and Marshall by a contrast between the modern and the traditional, where the latter consisted of agrarian societies of one sort or another, distinguished according to their particular form of social bond and land ownership. But the discovery of human prehistory in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the historical presuppositions shared by Marx and Marshall, leading both to revise not only their earlier historical accounts but also their conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the economic. While the discovery of prehistory can be seen as returning Smith's ``primitives'' to the historiographical stage, it also played an important part in fostering the twentieth-century separation of economics from history.

Customary rule-following behaviour in the work of John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall

“…15Cook (2013) develops Marshall's non-evolutionist intellectual influences on the meaning of history, namely Hegel, Maine and Edward Freeman.…”

Race and nation in Marshall's histories

“…9 This self-sufficient Asiatic village was for Marshall, as with Marx in mid-century, the non-trading basis of early despotic Oriental civilisations. For a systematic comparison of Marshall's historical thought with that of Marx and also Adam Smith, see Cook (2013). 10 On the German Historical School of Law and the revolution in the history of property and occupation see Part III of Toews (2004), chapter three of Stein (1980), Whitman (1990) and Momigliano (1982Momigliano ( , 1994.…”

“…On Freeman see Part III of Burrow (1983). For further discussion of Marshall's debts to Maine and Freeman see Cook (2013). Freeman identified the ancient Greeks, Romans and the modern Teutons or Germans as the three chief branches of the Aryan family; an identification that Marshall would repeat in his 1879 book, The Economics of Industry.…”