The History of Nations: Nationalism in Marshall's Political Economy (original) (raw)

Race & Nation in Marshall's Histories

European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2013

The paper makes a plea for engaging with the racist components of past thought as opposed to either ignoring them or exploiting them for the sake of propaganda. The case of Alfred Marshall is used to illustrate how facing the idea of race in past thinkers can generate valuable insights in the history of economics. 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as following from Marshall's anxiety that his historical introduction to his Principles of Economics (1890) not appear out-of-date.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.

Regions, Nations and Beyond In Marshallian External Economies

2009

The clearest expressions of Marshallian external economies are found in the life and working of compact industrial districts. However Alfred Marshall did not limit their application to such types of places, nor to their territorial scale. This paper illustrates some important extensions found in Marshall’s works, particularly in Industry and Trade, concerning firstly the advantages accruing to industrial districts within

The National Dimension of Citizenship in T.H. Marshall

Citizenship Studies, 1998

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.