Alfred Marshall - Alfred Marshall (July 26, 1842-July 13, 1924) was a major economist of his time who influenced the discipline for about half a century, and his Principles of Economics (1890) held sway as a textbook in England for a long time. It was Marshall who popularised the use of demand and supply functions, and contributed to the 'marginalist' economics with its concepts like marginal utility and marginal cost etc. Not surprisingly, Marshall influenced a number of eminent economists of later days, including John Menard Keynes and Arthur Cecil Pigou. Marshall's approach to social science was one in which economics plays an important but limited role. He felt that economics must not ignore the social, political, ethical and other aspects of life, with which economic life has an integral relationship. Having been a brilliant student of mathematics, Marshall did use mathematics as a language of presentation, rather on a wide scale, but yet his use of mathematics was quite different from, say, that by William Stanley Jevons, as he felt that economics must not distance itself from the layman. The present work is an in-depth investigation of the business organisations and industrial techniques, a unique exercise of its kind, and quite different from other "neo classical" works, as Marshall keeps here his presentation free from mathematical niceties. The Pure Theory of Foreign Trade and The Economics of Industry (in collaboration with his wife, Mary Paley Marshall) are some other works of this eminent thinker.
