CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

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only “mild and gentle steps” meant that his rather timid musings on economics
were quickly overtaken. He is most remembered today for the brilliance
and breadth of his philosophical analysis in Methods of Ethics and the
authority he conferred upon his followers at Cambridge.
The foremost of those tutored by Henry Sidgwick was Alfred Marshall.
Born in London in 1842 and for awhile considering the Anglican ministry,
he opted instead for mathematics at Cambridge. A loan of several hundred
pounds financed his studies, given by an uncle who made money raising
sheep in Australia utilizing convict and indentured labor. Perhaps this explains
Marshall’s later remark, “It is true that slavery was not always entirely
without advantages.” 11
After teaching at University College Bristol and then at Oxford, Marshall
received an appointment as professor of political economy at Cambridge
in 1885, a position he held for 23 years. Despite a prickly personality
and little involvement in university affairs, he nevertheless secured for Cambridge
and for England primacy in the emerging science of economics.
Marshall’s major work, Principles of Economics, appeared in 1890. An
eighth edition of his continuously edited tome appeared in 1920, and two
further books—Industry and Trade and Money, Credit and Commerce—were
published in 1919 and 1923, respectively. These three established Marshall’s
dominion over his subject, extending decades beyond his death in 1924.
Marshall sought to combine the measurement of utility with his compassion
for the poor to produce an advancing world. While subscribing to
the objective of maximizing pleasure and satisfaction, he was critical of eighteenth
and early nineteenth century utilitarian proponents, finding that “. . .
their work is marred by a certain hardness of outline and even harshness of
temper. These faults were partly due to Bentham’s direct influence.” 12 He
had greater rapport with Bentham’s successors: “A higher notion of social
duty is spreading everywhere. In Parliament, in the press and in the pulpit,
the spirit of humanity speaks more distinctly and more earnestly. Mill and
the economists who have followed him have helped onwards this general
movement.” 13
Marshall often toured poor urban and rural areas in order to hone his
sympathies for England’s millions living in deprivation. But he wanted economics
to stand on its own two feet, separated from political and ethical
overtones. His rationale went as follows: “Utility is taken to be correlative of