This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y Com m erciale] On: 10 Decem ber 2013, At : 00: 28 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rej h20 Race and nation in Marshall's histories Simon John Cook Published online: 09 Sep 2013. To cite this article: Simon John Cook (2013) Race and nat ion in Marshall's hist ories, The European Journal of t he Hist ory of Economic Thought , 20:6, 940-956, DOI: 10.1080/ 09672567.2013.815243 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 09672567.2013.815243 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. 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History of Economic Thought, 2013 Vol. 20, No. 6, 940–956, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672567.2013.815243 Race and nation in Marshall’s histories Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. Hannah Arendt (1950). 1. Introduction The following sentence appears in the introductory historical chapter of the first edition of Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890: 16): The chief leadership of progress has fallen to the successive waves of Aryans that have spread over Europe and Asia from their early homes in lands of frost and snow. In the passage that this sentence begins, Marshall proceeds to explain how, after conquering and ruling the civilisations of the Orient, the racial vigour of the early waves of Aryans was corrupted by luxury and the warm climate. Eventually, however, a group of Aryans maintained its racial vigour: these were the ancient Greeks, who founded Western civilisation. At first sight, this looks like the kind of racial history we associate with the Third Reich, and it is hard to see that it has any relevance whatsoever to modern economic ideas. It is perhaps understandable, therefore, that hitherto historians of economics have given such statements by Marshall a wide berth. In this paper, I will trace the intellectual steps that led Marshall to the composition of his accounts of Aryan history. Specifically, I will look first at the two sides of his dualistic philosophy of mind and then turn to his engagements with contemporary historical scholarship. The result will be something of an anticlimax. For what we shall find is that Marshall’s thought, while surely not politically correct by today’s lights, was nevertheless not a variety of the biological racial determinism that we associate with Address for correspondence 613 Luzit, Israel; e-mail: simonjohncook@gmail.com Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories National Socialism. But, in so tracing the development of Marshall’s idea of race we shall – along the way – also discover the genesis of his thinking about the modern nation and the modern spirit of nationality; and these ideas do have a direct bearing on modern economic thought. For the ideas of the ‘economic nation’ and of the ‘spirit of belonging to a place’ stand at the very heart of the current ‘Marshallian revival’, associated particularly with the work of Giacomo Becattini, with its pluralist challenge to both Marxist visions of class-conflict and the individualism of neoclassical economics.1 And so I hope to demonstrate that an excursion into intellectual history that leads through politically and even morally obnoxious ground may, indeed, prove of value to the history of economics. 2. Philosophical dualism We begin at the beginning of Marshall’s academic career. In 1868 he began lecturing in the Moral Sciences Tripos of Cambridge University. His primary interest at this point was not political economy but ‘mental philosophy’, or psychology. Over two decades ago, Tiziano Raffaelli (1994) published four philosophical manuscripts from this period. These manuscripts show Marshall developing a dualistic philosophy of the mind, such that, on the one hand, self-consciousness is posited as an irreducibly spiritual dimension of human experience; while, on the other hand, Marshall (in a manuscript entitled ‘Ye Machine’) set out a mechanical model of how the brain generates other mental phenomena.2 Turning first to this mechanical model, we find that the young Marshall’s basic idea is that most of what we do is automatic (area A in Diagram 1). Marshall posits a circuit, such that inputs from the external world in the form of impressions generate automatic responses in the form of actions. The most obvious illustration today would probably be our automatic response on seeing a red traffic light whilst driving a car. Thus, area A in the diagram may be viewed as a sort of proto-unconscious which, in physiological terms, works by means of a series of reflex nervous connections of the kind that the experiments of Ivan Pavlov will subsequently illuminate. 1 See, in particular, Becattini (2003, 2009). 2 It should be pointed out that Raffaelli has taken exception to my dualistic reading of Marshall’s philosophical development. In his view, Marshall’s initial dualism soon gave way to a physicalist monism. See Raffaelli’s criticism of my book published in this journal (Raffaelli 2012), as well as my reply (Cook 2012). A monistic interpretation of Marshall’s mature philosophy, it may be said, must find a different explanation of Marshall’s distinction between ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ than that set out in the present paper. 941 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook Diagram 1. Mechanical mind. Diagram 2. Primitive and modern minds. 942 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories Diagram 3. Evolutionary paths of the original Aryan village community. But what if a novel situation arises? In such circumstances the circuit just described pauses and a second, upper circuit comes into action (area B). In ‘Ye Machine’, Marshall posits two modes of operation of this upper circuit. Initially, and following Darwin’s idea of random variation, the upper circuit generates purely random responses. But Marshall subsequently outlines a more evolved human brain, in which the upper circuit allows ‘the machine’ to represent to itself possible consequences of various actions; he calls this ‘deliberation’. In both cases, successful (or at least non-fatal) reactions are repeated, and continued repetition generates a new lower level automatic circuit – or ‘mental habit’. It is interesting here to observe how the dynamic nature of this mental machinery – the capacity to grow as new innovations become old routines – presents a stark contrast to the logical model of the mind constructed around the same time by Marshall’s contemporary, William Stanley Jevons. For Jevons, George Boole’s new logic described the very forms of thought (Maas 2005) and, as such, all human minds essentially work the same way. Marshall did not look to logic, but to a fusion of physiology and associationist psychology, and the result was a model suggesting that different individual human minds are likely to work differently.3 3 For a discussion of the different uses of logic and psychology made by Jevons and Marshall in their respective mechanical models of the mind, as well as the institutional and theological background to Marshall’s choice, see Cook (2005a) and chapters 3 and 4 of Cook (2009). 943 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook Marshall’s mechanical model of the individual mind also lends itself to an account of differences between human populations. Assume two societies, inhabiting different environments. Over time different environmental challenges will lead individuals within the societies to generate different automatic routines. Now, (implicitly following Lamarck) Marshall suggests that an individual developing new automatic routines may pass them on to offspring, which we may describe as inheritance. But he also makes clear that humans are likely to mimic the successful behaviours of others, which we may call learning. In one way or another, then, these individuals will pass on the new behaviour to other members of their societies. And so, over time, the members of the two different societies will end up with different brains, and therefore different minds. But can we identify these different mind-sets as racial characteristics? I think there is no clear-cut answer to this question. Certainly, Marshall does not employ a biological language of race at this point in his academic career. It is true that we have a model in which behaviour may be inherited; but then education may undermine inheritance. And the simple fact is that in ‘Ye Machine’ Marshall does not discuss either inheritance or learning in any detail. And so I think that we must conclude that, while his mechanical psychological model has the potential to generate an idea of race, at this point Marshall has not developed from this model any clear idea of race. We shall find this conclusion reinforced, or at the least illuminated, when we turn from the physiological to the idealistic side of Marshall’s dualistic philosophy of mind. In order to do this we need to turn to his engagement with Hegel’s Philosophy of History in the early 1870s. Around 1872 Marshall composed a long essay on the history of civilisation (Cook 2005b), which drew heavily on the first parts of Hegel’s book. Briefly stated, this essay begins with ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations and proceeds to chart the development – as an East to West movement – of what Marshall had in his earlier philosophical manuscripts identified as self-consciousness, but which he now also terms ‘freedom’.4 Note that here freedom for Marshall means self-determination and, as such, freedom cannot exist if there is no consciousness of self. In this essay Marshall is in effect placing his dualistic model of the mind within history, and in doing so bringing to light – or refining – its 4 In his notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marshall copies out the following: ‘Spirit is the self contained existence . . . this is Freedom exactly. . . This self contained existence of spirit is none other than self-consciousness’ (Cook 2005b: M 4/10: f.4). 944 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories workings. The earliest civilisations, he suggests, are composed of humans who operate entirely under the governance of established habits and who – in novel situations – act randomly (the primitive mind of Diagram 2). In some early lecture notes that are evidently connected to the long historical essay, Marshall compares these early civilisations to beehives and anthills: their inhabitants are not possessed of self-consciousness, and so they are not free to determine their own actions.5 The primitive humans who inhabit such early societies regard all social rules (the caste system, or slavery, for example) as ‘ordinances of Nature’. ‘As a consequence, then, of this passive acquiescence in “Natural” arrangements’, writes Marshall in the long essay, ‘we have an absence of the habit of determination of his conduct on the part of each individual. . . Trade, in any broad sense of the word does not exist. Division of labor is confined practically to the narrow sphere of one village’ (Cook 2005b: M 3/1: f.24). As Marshall recounts the history of civilisation in this long essay, each stage proceeds with the further development of self-consciousness. And the development of these stages, we may infer, runs parallel to the development of the upper machinery of the mind (the end result being the modern mind of Diagram 2). In this history, the advent of Christianity marks a particularly significant turning point. From this time onward a ‘deliberate appeal to conscience was recognised as the proper commencement of any course of action; custom was dethroned’ (Cook 2005b: M 4/12: f.1). Marshall is here insisting that to deliberate upon our actions – to choose to employ the upper machinery of the mind – is itself a moral action.6 But his long essay as a whole also suggests that selfconsciousness or moral freedom is a precondition of higher level mechanical thought. Without it, only random responses to novel situations are possible. 5 In these lecture notes, Marshall writes: ‘Instinct: bees require no instruction no pure thought; close analogy between constitution of a hive & constitution of ancient civilisation’ (Cook 2005b: M 4/10: f.2). 6 This philosophical refinement of the mechanical model of the mind is pregnant with implications. Just to begin with, Marshall is here establishing that political economy is not a natural but a moral science. And it is upon these grounds that, in the 1870s, Marshall will proceed to criticise – and then reformulate – key doctrines of classical political economy. In a word, anything that smacked of an identification of economic reality with the natural order was in need of reformation, be it the terminology of ‘natural values’ or an implicit assumption that the existence of an uncultivated working class was somehow ‘natural’. For elaboration of these claims see Cook (2009). 945 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook This reading of his early philosophical engagement with history brings to light the underlying conceptual opposition that informs Marshall’s thinking: a dichotomy between nature (as necessity) and (moral) freewill. This is a distinctly Victorian dichotomy, which in the first instance derives from the organising principle of the Cambridge moral sciences.7 Indeed, it is important to recognise that this dichotomy is not reducible to the conceptual opposition that became paradigmatic to twentieth-century Western social science: the dichotomy between (biological) race and (anthropological) culture. To be clear on this point, Marshall does not employ a notion of ‘culture’, but if we were to search for it within his model we would encounter it in the form of both learned and inherited physiologically based mental routines. In other words, Marshall does not have an idea of culture as something distinct from biology, and what he opposes to the body is not culture but self-consciousness and moral freedom. I think we can now see why it was that Marshall’s mechanical model of the mind did not at first suggest to him a physiological idea of race. For his overall philosophy of mind directed his attention toward the significance of moral freedom as opposed to physiological routine, and the question of possible divergences of standard physiological routines among various populations was, at best, very much a secondary concern. But, by the same token, we can now see that in his idea of primitive society Marshall was confronted with a straightforward opposition between learned and inherited behaviours. This, of course, is because in his historical model there is no moral freedom within primitive society. In the following section I will suggest that it was, at least in the first instance, by way of the elaboration of his initial model of primitive society that Marshall developed an idea of race. 3. Comparative historical scholarship By around 1874 Marshall had arrived at a more sophisticated conception of primitive society. This was the product of an engagement with contemporary English historical scholarship, most importantly, the historical jurisprudence of Henry Maine and the comparative scholarship of the Oxford historian, Edward Freeman. The starting-point of this model was Maine’s assertion of a similarity of form between, on the one hand, the early village 7 See the discussions of John Grote’s stewardship of the Moral Sciences Tripos in Cook (2005a, 2009). 946 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories communities of the Germanic tribes that had overrun the Roman Empire, and on the other the village communities of present day India. This connection allowed the historical model as a whole to be presented as a political or institutional genealogy of the Aryan peoples, constructed in the image of comparative philology and mythology.8 As such, Aryan history is said to begin with an original village community located somewhere in Asia, which subsequently evolved along different paths as it diffused westward (see Diagram 3).9 Let us begin with the primitive Aryan village community itself. According to Maine, this social form has three key characteristics: it holds its property – or at least the land that it works – in common; it is organised according to a system of kinship; it is governed by a network of fixed customs. The idea of primitive communal property originated in the early nineteenth century with the German Historical School of Law.10 But in England by the 1860s property relations had become but one facet of a wider conception of primitive social relationships; historical jurisprudence had given way to social anthropology.11 Maine and Freeman argued that when tribes bound together by ties of kinship and holding possessions in common settle down to till the soil, two key changes were liable to occur: first, a gradual transformation of the social bond, from ties of kinship to ties based on shared territory 8 While I was led to this model by examination of Marshall’s early historical notes, it is found in only embryonic form in the early essay. What seems to have happened is that his initial interest in the history of religion led Marshall to Max M€ uller’s genealogical investigation of Aryan mythology (Cook 2008: M 4/10), and that once a genealogical model of Aryan history had become a central object of his historical studies he was led to the discovery of Maine and Freeman’s genealogical models of Aryan political institutions. 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 (1982, 1994). In mid-century Karl Marx gave this historical model his own distinctive twist by relating form of ownership – i.e. ‘relations of production’ – to the means of production. On Marx’s debt to the German Historical School see Kelley (1978, 1984), Levine (1987) and Jones (2002: 148–61). 11 The birth of social anthropology has been located in the protracted argument of these years as to whether the original kinship system was patriarchal or matriarchal. See, in particular, Trautmann (1988) and Kuper (2005). 947 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook (from being a Frank to being a citizen of France); and second, the gradual transformation of common into private property.12 Freeman went on to argue that in the ancient world a precocious civic or urban development had arrested the natural movement from status to contract.13 Citizenship in the ancient city-state had therefore remained a matter of hereditary descent and shared blood. Historically, this was a dead end. After the Germanic tribes had overrun the Roman Empire, by contrast, the village community continued to evolve and, by a process of gradual incorporation and assimilation, it absorbed other villages, alien individuals and even entire peoples, thereby creating the modern nations of Europe. This last point needs to be emphasised, not least because it will be totally eclipsed by the subsequent history of the Aryan idea. Freeman is claiming that the ancient city-state remained an ethnic grouping, in which the bond of citizenship is a tie of blood. But, he further asserts, what is distinctive about modern national life is precisely that citizenship is not defined by blood and race and that the modern nation is therefore able to assimilate different ethnic groups. This is perhaps a very British rendering of the Aryan idea, inspired not only by nineteenth-century imperialism – in which the Aryan idea served to establish a paternalist bond of kinship between Englishmen and Indians,14 but also by an internal history in which Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all understood to have contributed to the ‘national history’ and the creation of a single ‘national character’. So what impact did all this have on Marshall’s thinking on race? Marshall proceeded to adopt wholesale Maine’s account of the primitive 12 This connection between agricultural life and social progress potentially reconciled economic modernity with its romantic critics; for the underlying claim was that the individualism of modern Western industrial society was the gradual creation of countless generations working on the land; contra both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the medieval city could be seen as a natural outgrowth out of the feudal countryside. 13 See, in particular, Freeman (1874), Maine (1871) and Marshall’s notes on both of these works in Part II, section 2 of Cook (2008). On Maine see Cocks (1988), Diamond (1991) and Mantena (2010). 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. 14 On the significance of India to British ideas of the Aryans see Trautmann (2004). 948 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories village community which, in all his historical writing subsequent to the early long essay, now replaced his initial identification of the starting-point of social evolution with beehives and anthills. Actually, what really interested Marshall about the village community was the ‘network of customary rules’ that was said to govern both production and relative prices. For with this as a starting-point, social evolution could be formulated as the process whereby a network of custom gave way to the system of voluntary exchanges of the modern economy (with the historicist methodological proviso that any particular region of the modern world was likely still to embody various and numerous more or less archaic customs, and so the economist must be sensitive to context in the application of the machinery of economics). Nevertheless, Marshall also accepted that such customs rested upon a social organisation based upon a system of kinship. Now, the very idea of primitive society as organised by ties of blood lends itself to the idea of race as an organising principle of primitive society; and such an idea was of course strengthened by Marshall’s physiological model which, as we have seen, suggests that over time marriage within the community will amplify the effects of behavioural inheritance.15 I therefore suggest that Marshall’s hitherto embryonic idea of race was given concrete shape when his model of the primitive mind was placed within this model of primitive kinship. But I also want to suggest that this emerging idea of race was shaped by way of the simultaneous conception of its opposite – modern nationality. The key point here is that Marshall had no need of Maine and Freeman’s idea of the progressive effects of agriculture, for he could explain the same social evolution directly by way of his philosophical account of mental and moral development.16 The historical account that follows from the meeting of psychology, Hegel and comparative history may be found in very condensed form in the 1879 Economics of Industry. Here the various paths of development out of an original village community are related to 15 This is not to say that there was anything like a complete fit of psychological and social model: following Maine, Marshall emphasised the significance of adoption, which means that the meaning of ‘blood tie’ and accepted common descent is to be found in legal custom rather than racial biology. 16 This is in fact a key to various divergences between Marshall on the one hand and Maine and Freeman on the other with regard to their respective understandings of feudalism: for Marshall looks to Hegel and the idea of private property emerging in Rome as a correlate of the development of spirit, and so has no need of Maine and Freeman’s idea that feudalism is the crucial step in the development of private property. 949 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook different stages of moral and mental development. So, for example, the genesis of the modern nation is associated with the Teutonic ‘reverence for man as man’ (Marshall and Marshall 1879: 45). This supposed Germanic self-consciousness of a common humanity, it is important to understand, constitutes the precondition for that assimilation into the social group that Freeman had hailed as a distinguishing characteristic of the modern nation. So where the social bond of the archaic village community is established by the blood ties of a kinship system, something internal to the mind provides the modern social bond. Marshall comes to call this internal principle ‘the spirit of economic nationality’ (Marshall 1919: 33). In other words, primitive – and also ancient – societies are racial units, in which a system of kinship establishes the social bond as a blood tie. Modern nations, by contrast, are precisely not racial units, and the modern social bond is not imposed by the community upon the individual, but is rather established within the individual by the recognition (or construction) of identity. The idea of race thus emerges into view by way of a contrast with its opposite – nationality. 4. The new Aryans and the naming of race We have now covered all the ground that we need in order to understand Marshall’s ideas of both race and nation. But these ideas do not illuminate those statements about early Aryan invaders of the Orient with which the discussion of this paper commenced. Actually, there is a more general discrepancy or gap between the elements of Marshall’s historical thought sketched above and the introductory historical chapter of Marshall’s Principles. This divergence arises because Marshall had the misfortune of absorbing the historical thesis that the Aryan village community was the seed out of which evolved modern Western society just before that thesis went out of scholarly fashion. In the wake of the Franco–Prussian War (1870–1871), French scholars such as Fustel de Coulanges engaged in a sustained and ultimately successful onslaught upon the idea of a Germanic origin of the modern European nations. French ideas were soon imported into England. In 1883 Frederic Seebohm argued that the feudal manor derived from the slave-worked villa of the Roman Empire, and had not evolved – as claimed by, for example, Maine – from the version of the village community established in Western Europe by the Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire. By 1888, W.J. Ashley would insist that the economic historian must begin with the feudal system of the eleventh century, ‘and we cannot begin earlier because it is by no means agreed how that condition of things came about’ 950 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories (Ashley 1888: 13).17 Marshall took Ashley’s words seriously (he referenced the relevant discussions of both Ashley and Seebohm in his Principles) and, clearly afraid of appearing out of date, he chose to emasculate his historical model by simply omitting from his introductory historical chapter any discussion of the evolution of the German village community (or mark) into the feudal manor.18 In the 1880s a further development drove a final nail into the coffin of the idea of the Aryan village community as the seed of Western civilisation. We have already encountered this development in the quotation from the Principles with which we began, in which Marshall posits successive waves of Aryan invaders as the vanguard of historical progress. Over the course of the 1880s a new Aryan began to appear in the pages of English scholarly writing; very different to the old Aryan, whose history had been told by Maine and Freeman. For the old Aryan had been a construction of comparative philologists: his identity was established by his language and his original homeland taken to be somewhere in Asia. The new Aryan, by contrast, was defined by biological criteria such as skull measurements, and he was taken to be the descendant of the reindeer-hunting cave-artists of Ice Age Europe. Of a number of important factors at work here, two may be highlighted: the claim that the measurement of prehistoric and modern European skulls reveals a continuity of racial population in Europe, and the realisation that, in comparison to the records of what were taken to be 17 See Marshall (1890: 677), note. for references to the relevant discussions of both Seebohm and Ashley. Note that Ashley’s declaration that economic history cannot start before the Norman Conquest (because there is no consensus as to the origins of feudalism) marks the beginning of the end of serious scholarly interest in universal history within England; henceforth different academic specialisations will increasingly study different periods of history – ancient, medieval and so on. And what this means is that the contrast of ancient race with modern nation that we have found in Marshall’s early writings will disappear from English scholarship; a situation very different from that found with the historical economists (culminating in Weber) in Germany. 18 This leads to a fresh perspective on the supposedly defining moment of the socalled English methodenstreit when, in 1892, the historical economist William Cunningham launched a savage attack on Marshall’s historical chapter as a ‘perversion of economic history’. For in the second edition of his Growth of English Industry and Commerce, which also appeared in 1890, Cunningham retained his earlier account of how the Anglo-Saxon village community had evolved into the feudal manor, and this led to a stinging review of Cunningham’s book by Ashley. In other words, by 1890 Marshall was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea: he could either emasculate his original historical model, thereby attracting the ire of Cunningham, or he could maintain it and face the scorn of Ashley. 951 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook hunting expeditions painted on cave walls in the South of France, the ‘records on Babylonian tablets . . . or in Egyptian tombs’ appear ‘altogether modern’ (Taylor 1890: 17). The new biological Aryan was supposed to have originated in Europe, not Asia. Therefore, the presence of Aryan languages across Asia had to be explained by a dissemination of the Aryans from West to East. Now, where the comparative philologists had posited migrations from Asia into Europe of entire peoples (and their languages, mythologies and social institutions), the new claim was that bands of Aryan warriors had headed out of Europe and conquered already existing Eastern civilisations, ruling them as warrior aristocracies. The newly discovered tombs of Mycenae, for example, were taken to hold Aryan warriors who had entered Greece through Thrace, founded ancient Greek civilisation and laid siege to their fellow Aryan inhabitants of Troy. And one point of this new doctrine of conquest was that it supposedly explained why dark skinned Asiatic peoples spoke Aryan languages – the language of their ancient conquerors – but were not of the same Aryan blood as their conquerors. In terms of models of history, a revolution separates Marshall’s thinking of the 1870s and the historical chapter that he composed for the Principles in 1890. Nevertheless, I suggest that core elements of this introductory chapter reflect not so much their author’s underlying historical vision but rather a desperate desire not to appear out-of-date. Just as his decision not to emphasise the evolution of village community into feudal manor punched a hole in the middle of his historical narrative so, in gesturing to this new racial idea of the invading Aryan warrior, Marshall effectively undermined his earlier model of the Aryan nation as what today we might call a ‘cultural grouping’ into which any ethnic group might assimilate.19 The seminal idea of an ‘economic nation’ was thus subverted and obscured from view. In terms of his thinking on race I would suggest that there is little to separate Marshall’s ideas of the mid-1870s and his writing of 1890, except for the fact that in this later writing Marshall has now named this idea and begun to deploy a new language of race (testimony to which is scattered throughout his Principles). Let us return again to Marshall’s account of waves of conquering Aryan warriors which, it should be recalled, prior to 19 That this racial account of early civilisation was a new element in Marshall’s historical ideas is evident when we observe that the 1879 Economics of Industry filled the same pre-agricultural prehistory of civilisation by providing an abbreviated version of the first parts of Smith’s stadial history (see Marshall and Marshall 1879: 43; the unacknowledged quotations in this account are in fact taken from the brief stadial sketch in J.S. Mill’s Principles). 952 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Race and nation in Marshall’ s histories the ancient Greeks first conquered older Oriental civilisations, and then lost their racial vigour. But this loss of racial strength is not attributed to some dilution of pure Aryan blood as a result of inter-racial mixing. Marshall’s explanation is rather the time-honoured republican idea that luxury corrupts virtue and the Lamarckian idea that race is shaped by environment (that is, the Aryans wilt under a hot sun – presumably as did many of the British in the India of Marshall’s day). Thus, Marshall’s language of race is new, and it follows from his adoption of a newly fashionable account of the origins of civilisation; but what he actually says about race is based upon the same old ideas of physiological character as mutable, of Lamarckian inheritance and of primitive kinship. 5. Conclusion I would like to conclude by relating Marshall’s ideas of race and nationality. In Marshall’s thinking, race and nationality are related both historically and philosophically. Historically, nationality arises out of race. That is, over time a social identity based upon blood tie and common descent comes to be replaced by a social identity based upon shared nationality. So, from the historical perspective, nationality might be considered the modern child of a primitive race. Philosophically, however, nationality is independent of race. For the categories of race and nation derive ultimately from Marshall’s philosophical dualism, and as such reflect his metaphysical hierarchy. Put simply, race is of the body, and so is physically given or determined, while nationality is of self-consciousness, and so in some profound sense is a free choice. Now, this philosophical independence of nationality entails that the spirit of nationality, while born of ancient ideas of race, nevertheless becomes in the modern world a general principle of social identity. For while it may connect together as a nation various individuals who feel themselves to share an ethnicity, it may equally well connect as a nation individuals who feel themselves bound together because they inhabit the same territory – that is, share a regional identity;20 and it may even bring together as an ‘economic nation’ individuals who believe that they share a class or other form of industrial identity. The ways in which such national identities form within modern society cannot be predetermined. That is to say, historical circumstances may facilitate the formation of this or that ‘economic nation’, but the actual formation of a national identity – at least 20 As Marshall put it in Industry and Trade (1919), if certain local conditions prevail then ‘the people’ of a particular place constitute an ‘[economic] nation within a [political] nation’ (Marshall 1919: 14). 953 Downloaded by [University Commerciale] at 00:28 10 December 2013 Simon John Cook according to Marshall’s way of thinking – is never determined by such factors. Nevertheless, this ‘spirit of nationality’ will itself shape key economic and social factors. For example, the decision to invest capital in one place rather than another, or again, the dissemination within the nation, by one means or another, of those key mental routines as may be constitutive of particular local skills and knowledge. We may thus conclude by offering the following two observations. First, Marshall fashioned an extremely powerful idea of nationality, which remains of profound relevance in the early-twenty-first century. And second, what has allowed us to illuminate Marshall’s idea of nationality has been an engagement with his late-nineteenth-century ideas of race – ideas that we ourselves would no doubt like to discard as a dead load, and see time bury in oblivion. Acknowledgements This essay began life as the Blanqui lecture of 2012. Anxiety at the prospect of public performance proved a useful motivating factor, generating many more fresh drafts than my usual journal efforts. Along the way, Keith Tribe, Michael Cook, Rachel Stroumsa, Carlo Cristiano, and Donald Winch provided inspiration, encouragement, time, friendship, and criticism. References Arendt, H. (1950). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Ashley, W.J. (1888). An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory: The Middle Ages. London: Rivingtons. Becattini, G. (2003). 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The main body of the paper traces the development of Marshall’s idea of race. It further points to a gap between this idea and some of his written statements, which it explains as following from Marshall’s anxiety that his historical introduction to his Principles of Economics (1890) not appear out-of-date. The derivation of Marshall’s idea of race is connected to the derivation of his idea of nationality. Where ties of blood and common descent provided the social bond in primitive and ancient societies, an internal principle of nationality provides the equivalent for modern nations. But this principle of nationality is seen to be a general principle of social identity of profound relevance for understanding our early twenty-first-century societies and standing at the heart of the recent ‘Marshallian revival’. An inquiry into Marshall’s idea of race thus indirectly generates insight into the intellectual roots of contemporary Marshallian ideas. Keywords Alfred Marshall, Aryans, historical school, race, nation 956