Principles of Economics, Book 1: Preliminary Survey

Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was an English economist who taught at Cambridge and became one of the most influential figures in the development of the discipline. His Principles of Economics was first published in 1890 and was a leading economics textbook for decades. He began work on it in 1881 and gave most of the following decade to it. The first volume appeared in 1890 and made his reputation across the English-speaking world; a planned second volume was never published.

The book went through several editions in his lifetime, and the eighth, which appeared in 1920, is the one commonly reproduced. Marshall was concerned to bring together the older classical tradition and the newer ideas about marginal analysis, and he did so with a strong sense of the social purpose of economics. He believed that the study of wealth was at heart a study of people and of the improvement of their lives.

Book 1, the Preliminary Survey, is the part that sets out his view of the subject. It contains the prefaces, an introduction and chapters on the substance of economics, and it deals with questions of method and scope rather than with the technical analysis that follows in later books. For that reason it is an accessible portion of the work, suitable for readers who want to understand the spirit of Marshall's approach. Many ideas that later textbooks treat as standard, such as the distinction between short-run and long-run effects, were worked out with great care in his pages.

This LibriVox recording is shared among six volunteers, among them Carl Manchester, a reader known as economist, and Carmina Sansone. It lasts about two hours and is divided into six files.