MARX AND MARSHALL

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 4

MARX AND MARSHALL

Marshall, Marx and Modern Times. By Clark Kerr. Cambridge University Press. 138 pp. This short book is encumbered with garlands: a sub-title “The MultiDimensional Society,” and then it is the Marshall Lectures 1967-68. It was wholly appropriate that this American economist should lecture in Cambridge honouring the memory of the great English economist, Alfred Marshall, as Professor Kerr displays the wit and urbanity one likes to associate with Marshall’s university. Professor Kerr's comparison of Marx and Marshall is fruitful. “Marx stood for collectivity reached through class warfare; Marshall for the individual serviced by the market" But neither was completely ruthless in applying his theory. “Marshall was more sympathetic to aspects of socialism and Marx more of a Victorian utopian than , the surviving image of either allows”. Professor Kerr goes on to survey all the considerations (e.g. inflation) these great men never had to contend with, and adroitly sketches in, in terms as much sociological as economic, the lineaments of a modern “classless” community where government, great corporations and large unions are in cahoots to run the economy for mutual benefit, and the dissatisfied outsiders are the “under-class” of the unemployed and the rejected (15 per cent in the U.S.A.), the old and retired (10 per cent) and—that “intractable problem” —the students and intellectuals, all avowedly anti-establishment This stimulating and perceptive book is full of asides tempting to quote: to hold a job is “more like a marriage contract than a bill of sale.” But life is brief and the future “is a very long time in vjhich we are all dead.”