Simon Cook's study is an extremely lucid account of the relationship between Alfred Marshall's work in economics and his social philosophy. He exposes the variety of influences, arguments, and social contexts which informed Marshall's development and locates him succinctly amongst the schools of social thought current in British universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. Cook has written not only for the historian of economics, but for any student of intellectual history whose interest alights on Marshall and the changing values of British liberalism's academic wing during the years between 1860 and 1890. The book combines careful scholarship on Marshall's papers and publications, a grasp of what his ideas meant within the traditions that nurtured him, and a sense of his economics as truly built upon, rather than alongside, his philosophical commitments.

Cook's reading of Marshall's formative intellectual experiences both shows the coherence of his project and stresses his Hegelianism. Marshall is painted as a fundamentally dialectical thinker, whose overarching framework emerged through an engagement with the questions that British philosophy asked about the nature of the mind. Cook convincingly shows that to understand Marshall one should begin with his adoption of a dualist psychology during the late 1860s, which resembled the associationism of John Stuart Mill and Alexander Bain but preserved a space for the inexplicable nature of self-consciousness. Cook argues that this picture of the mind paved the way for Marshall's understanding of Hegel's subjective and objective freedom. As he continued to lecture and write, Marshall moved towards a vision of modern economic life as resting on, and leading towards, changes in self-consciousness and human capacity for self-direction, but open to a spatially and temporally limited analysis couched in terms of the mechanical elements of human psychology. Thus his reflection on the inexplicable existence of a higher spiritual element in human history and thought delineated and justified an account of the workings of the lower, habitual, economic world.

Whilst this formulation clearly presents the problem of Marshall's religious convictions, Cook concedes that we do not have enough evidence to define precisely his spirituality during the crucial period of the 1870s. The connective tissue between Marshall's philosophy of history and his economic ideas, in particular his response to the problem of value, is more evident in his focus on education. Cook places Marshall firmly among the academic liberals and their concern with the education of the working classes, drawing attention to their perceived failure following the parliamentary reforms of 1867 and to the subsequent university extension movement with which he was heavily involved. Of equal importance for Marshall was the educational influence of trade unionism and co-operative production on the future of the working classes, which was addressed by John Stuart Mill and the Positivist Edward Beesly before being taken up by him. Cook's analysis of this debate does not convey the influence of practical developments in the same manner as his account of Marshall's attitude to university education, yet still provides a good grounding for the argument at hand. For Marshall's idea of value as subjective is shown to be intimately related to his idea that education was a vital element in the determination of wage levels, and to his conviction that a more just society was possible.

More space might have been devoted to the conundrum of Marshall's originality: how far did his political stance deviate in practice from that of John Stuart Mill, who sought to relate worker education, productivity, and remuneration in his advocacy of profit-sharing and co-operation? Yet Cook's argument that Marshall furthered the nascent practical optimism of Mill's economics by integrating it fully with the moral optimism of Frederick Denison Maurice and discarding the remnants of the Ricardian and Malthusian pessimism of the early nineteenth century is convincing. Cook explains though that Marshall himself conceived of this project as having more to do with tempering an eighteenth-century pagan naturalism than clearing away the cultural flotsam left by the high tide of evangelicalism. In this way he reinforces the book's introductory argument that Marshall stood in a tradition of moral realism, in an age that had lost sight of the understandings of moral realism and voluntarism that shaped the early, Scottish development of British political economy. The argument validates Cook's broader point that historians of political economy can gain more understanding than they have from the way that contemporaries saw the history of their subject.

Cook invites us to see Marshall as influenced by a host of greater and lesser figures, in a pattern which both allows for a deal of nuance and evokes the potential compatibility of various strands of nineteenth-century thought by ranging across psychological, historical, and economic writings and demonstrating the unity of the philosophical points at issue. The ultimate success of this enterprise hinges as much on an intelligent reading of the nineteenth-century human sciences at large as it does on a rigorous understanding of Marshall, and the results make this a book capable of communicating to a much larger circle than Marshall scholars alone.