Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

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СКАЧАТЬ chin,”²³ a domestic tyrant who bullied his wife and children. A night owl, he often kept Alfred up until eleven, drilling him in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.²⁴

      Not surprisingly, the boy suffered from panic attacks and migraines. A classmate remembered that he was “small and pale, badly dressed, and looked overworked.” Shy and nearly friendless, Marshall revealed “a genius for mathematics, a subject that his father despised,” and acquired a lifelong distaste for classical languages. “Alfred would conceal Potts’s Euclid in his pocket as he walked to and from school. He read a proposition and then worked it out in his mind as he walked along.”²⁵

      Merchant Taylors’ School was relatively cheap and heavily subsidized, but even with a salary of £250, William Marshall could barely afford the £20 per annum required to cover his son’s out-of-pocket expenses as a day student.²⁶ Yet the senior Marshall was willing to endure—and impose—the strictest economies to send Alfred there, because success at Merchant Taylors’ guaranteed a full scholarship to study classics at Oxford, no small prize at a time when a university education was a luxury that only one in five hundred young men of his son’s generation could afford. Even more important, under soon to be abolished statutes, the Oxford scholarship came with a virtual guarantee of a lifetime fellowship in classics at one of its colleges or entrée into the church, the civil service, or the faculty of the most prestigious preparatory schools.

      When Marshall announced his intention of turning down the Oxford scholarship and studying mathematics at Cambridge instead, his father raged, threatened, and cajoled. Only a substantial loan from an uncle in Australia and a mathematics scholarship enabled Marshall to defy parental authority and pursue his dream. When the seventeen-year-old went up to take his scholarship exam, he walked along the river Cam shouting with joy at his impending liberation.

      At the end of three years at St. John’s, there was another race to run, namely a grueling sporting event known as the Mathematical Tripos. Leslie Stephen, who was Marshall’s contemporary at Cambridge and the future father of Virginia Woolf, estimated that a second-place finish such as Marshall’s was worth as much as a £5,000 inheritance—one-half million dollars in today’s money—more than enough to get a leg up in life.²⁷ Marshall’s reward was immediate election to a lifetime fellowship at his college, which gave him the right to live at the college and to collect coaching and lecture fees (worth another £2,500 in Stephen’s reckoning). After a year of moonlighting at a preparatory school to repay his uncle’s loan, Marshall was, for the first time in his life, truly financially independent and free to do as he liked.

      How to best use his freedom was the great question. Mathematics was beginning to bore him. As Marshall sat high up in the pure Highland air reading Immanuel Kant (“The only man I ever worshipped”²⁸), the world below was hidden in mist. Yet the faces of the poor and images of drudgery and privation continued to haunt him. Like Pip, Alfred Marshall had shot up but could not forget those left behind.

      Marshall had returned to Cambridge from Scotland in October 1867, “brown and strong and upright.”²⁹ As an undergraduate he had been excluded from all the social clubs and private gatherings in dons’ rooms that constituted the most valuable parts of a Cambridge education. But now that he had achieved intellectual distinction, he was invited to join the Grote Club, a group of university radicals who met regularly to discuss political, scientific, and social questions. Their leader was Henry Sidgwick, a charismatic philosopher four years Marshall’s senior who quickly spotted Marshall’s talent and took him under his wing. “I was fashioned by him,” Marshall acknowledged. His own father had almost squeezed the life out of him, but Sidgwick “helped me to live.”³⁰

      With Sidgwick as intellectual guide, Marshall plunged into German metaphysics, evolutionary biology, and psychology, rising at five to read every day. He spent some months in Dresden and Berlin, where, according to biographer Peter Groeneweger, he “fell under the spell of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.”³¹ Like the young Hegel and Marx, he found Hegel’s message that individuals should govern themselves according to their own conscience, not in blind obedience to authority, compelling. He absorbed an evolutionary view of society from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859, and Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, published in 1862. An interest in psychology was stimulated by the possibility of “the higher and more rapid development of human faculties.”³² The young man whose chances in life had turned on access to first-rate education was coming to the conclusion that the greatest obstacles to man’s mental and moral development were material.

      He began to think of himself as a “Socialist.” In the 1860s, the term implied an interest in social reform or membership in a communal sect, while the equally expansive label of “Communist” encompassed everyone who thought that things couldn’t get better unless the whole system of private property and competition was torn down.³³ When Marshall questioned Sidgwick about overcoming class divisions, his mentor used to gently chide him, “Ah, if you understood political economy you would not say that.” Marshall took the hint. “It was my desire to know what was practical in social reform by State and other agencies that led me to read Adam Smith, Mill, Marx and LaSalle,” he later recalled. He began his education by reading John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, then in its sixth edition, and “got much excited about it.”³⁴

      His interest was intensified by the unexpected passage of the Reform Act of 1867, which, in a single stroke, turned England into a democracy. The act did more than double the size of the electorate by extending the franchise to some 888,000 adult men, mostly skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers, who paid at least £10 a year in rent or property tax. It brought the working classes into the political system and made democratic government the only acceptable form of government. Though it ignored the 3 million factory operatives, day laborers, and farm workers—and, of course, the entire female sex—twentieth-century historian Gertrude Himmelfarb emphasizes that the Reform Act nonetheless lent the notion of universal suffrage an aura of inevitability.³⁵ Marshall was troubled, though, by the contrast between the ideal of full citizenship and the reality of material squalor and deprivation that prevented most of his countrymen from taking full advantage of their civic freedoms.

      “Shooting up,” as Marshall had done, can provoke feelings of guilt or a sense of obligation. Victorian fiction is populated by the “double” who shares the hero’s attributes and aspirations but is condemned to stay put while the other shoots up. When the American journalist and writer Henry James explored London on foot in 1869, Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist of James’s 1886 novel about terrorists, seemed to jump “out of the London pavement.” James was watching the parade of brilliantly dressed figures, carriages, brilliantly lit mansions and theaters, the clubs and picture galleries emitting agreeable gusts of sound with a sense of doors that “opened into light and warmth and cheer, into good and charming relations,” when he conceived a young man very much like himself “watching the same public show . . . I had watched myself,” including “all the swarming facts” that spoke of “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety,” with only one difference: the bookbinder turned bomber in The Princess Casamassima would “be able to revolve around them but at the most respectful of distances and with every door of approach shut in his face.”³⁶

      Having been admitted to the rarified world of freedom, opportunity, knowledge, and ease, if not power or great wealth, Marshall kept the face of his double where he could see it every day:

      I saw in a shop-window a small oil painting [of a man’s face with a strikingly gaunt and wistful expression, as of one “down and out”] and bought it for a few shillings. I set it up above the chimney piece in my room in college and thenceforward called it my patron saint, and devoted myself to trying how to fit men like that for heaven.³⁷

      As Marshall studied the works of the founders of political economy, “economics grew and grew in practical urgency, СКАЧАТЬ