Principles of Economics (Great Minds Series)

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Summary: The Titan of the Neo-Classics
Review: The British economist Alfred Marshall is one of the greatest political economists of all times and this book represents a deep effort to address in an orderly way the many social and economical issues that were at stake at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. This way of addressing disturbing social questions is an Alfred Marshall trademark.

In this sense, his motto could well be the oft quoted " Natura non facit saltum" , which is Latin for "Nature does not evolves in leaps and bounds", and all things are going to be all right in the future but it will take some time untill they consolidate themselves into a coherent whole, where everyone in this world will have an opportunity to fully develop his natural propensities for love, companionship and free will. His view is helped by the many mathematical formulae he uses to illustrate his points of views, using differential calculus, due to his mathematical background. But the reader has not to worry if he/she is not proficient with this type of mathematical tools, because they are used only as a side-line to the text, which is dense and full of logical thinking in itself. Marshall, despite his mathematical background, didn't judge Mathematics as a fundamental tool to Politcal Economy.

Alfred Marshall is the most influential representant of the minimalist movement called Neo-Classics Economics (Stanley Jevons, Vilfredo Pareto , Karl Menger) and in this capacity is the most notorius proponent of what today is taught and learned in all Economics Schools over the world as Microeconomics, or the economics of particular competitive or non-competitive markets. In some way, he is both the inheritor of the Utilitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham, as of the economics doctrines of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. Also, one of the interesting facets of Marshall is that he had both John Neville Keynes (the father) and John Maynard Keynes (the son) as one of his pupils in Economics.

His knowledge of History and Mathematics is astounding and if he has not reached the status of Keynes or Adam Smith, this is more due to the constraints of the Victorian era in which he wrote this book, and the influences he received, than to any lack of deep understanding of economics realities, which were indeed recognized by John Maynard Keynes himself as fundamental to the latter development he gave to the so-called Dismall Science.

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Summary: Both reviewers are correct!!!
Review: The other two reviews in this page are both correct but they review different books. Both reviews, however, appear under both items. I would, therefore, keep the ratings of each reviewer for each edition.
The Great Minds Series is indeed abridged and omits crucial material from Marshall's Principles. Marshall put all the mathematical apparatus in the Mathematical Appendix which is omitted in the Great Minds Series. The Porcupine edition is the unabridged edition of Marshall's 1920 8th edition of the Principles. The first edition was in 1890.
There is also a variorum (9th edition) of the Principles edited by C. W. Guillebaud, 2 vols (1961), which is out of print, but it appears as volumes 4&5 in Peter Groenewegen's Collected Works of Alfred Marshall,Thoemmes, 1997. There is also a great free on-line edition in the Library of Economics and Liberty.
The book is by all means a classic. It consolidated neoclassical economics and it was one of the most influential books on economics ever written. Indeed, the very change of the name of economic science from "political economy" to "economics", although not suggested by Marshall, is due to the influence of the Principles.
To understand Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), I would suggest to read John Maynard Keynes's "Alfred Marshall" essay in Essays in Biography (1933) or Peter Groenewegen's magisterial biography "A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842-1924", Elgar,1995.

Rating:
Summary: The most influential book of Economics of the 20th century
Review: This is certainly one of the most influential books ever written, and served as a pathway to a lot of governmental measures adopted at by many countries to adopt its fiscal, employment and money policies to revert the forces of recession in the United States and Europe.

But this is not a book easy to read, given the fact that Keynes had to break a lot of prior misconceptions and fallacies of earlier economists. Also to be taken into consideration is that Keynes was especially keen of linguistics and got all the opportunities to present a very refined text with big literary value. What Keynes had in mind was to discard the useless precepts of free-hand economics, in the very tradition of early British neo-classical economists like Alfred Marshall and Stanley Jevons, and to energetically recomend state intervention to secure full-employment policies.

Keynes was instrumental in many important policies adopted in the first half of the last century and along with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, deserves to step to the pantheon of the most influential economists of all times.