Cambridge School of Political Economy

one of the late-19th-century trends in British bourgeois economic theory.

The founder of the school was A. Marshall, who headed the department of political economy at Cambridge University from 1885 to 1908. His followers and successors in the department were A. C. Pigou and D. Robertson. Their approach to economic categories was characteristically subjective and psychological; they rejected any inquiry into objective economic laws and strove to apply the theory of evolution to the development of society. Marshall’s works initiated the contemporary microeconomic tendency in bourgeois political economy, centering attention on the study of laws of development of separate particular markets. With the help of a theory of prices based on the theory of marginal utility, Marshall tried to prove the possibility of the development of capitalism without crises; he tried to demonstrate the absence of objective causes for unemployment and poverty in capitalist society. Pigou was one of the first bourgeois economists to spread the theory of welfare economics. Several of the theses of the Cambridge school are used in contemporary bourgeois political economy by representatives of the neoclassical tendency.