""The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century was... that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry." Thus Marshall in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge, referring to Ricardo (Marshall 1885, p. 155). In the circumstances of that occasion, the remark may have been intended in some part as an olive branch, because the only other serious contender for the Chair had been the High Tory economic historian William Cunningham, Archdeacon of Ely, famous as an anti-theoretical institutionalist and famous also as a polemicist - he was the clergyman who once told his congregation that for him the bliss of Heaven would be incomplete if it lacked the pleasures of controversy."
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University of Cambridge facultyUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumniEconomists from ScotlandNon-fiction authors from Scotland
Original Language: English
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R. C. O. Matthews
Robert (R.C.O.) Charles Oliver Matthews (16 June 1927 – 19 June 2010) was a Scottish economist, Professor of Political Economy at and later , and chess problemist.
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