Arthur William Marget (1899-1962) was a respected American monetary theorist and scholar who received his doctorate from Harvard in 1926 and taught for the next fifteen years at the University of Minnesota. His best known work, The Theory of Prices (2 vols: 1938, 1942), had three goals. Marget sought to demonstrate that Keynes misrepresented the history of monetary theory, to reveal the shortcomings of Keynes’s own approach, and to show that progress required an escape from the Keynesian “blind alley” and a return to the “high road” of earlier tradition.
The book was either behind its time, ahead of it, or (as I suspect) both. The doctrinal revolution that Marget opposed swept The Theory of Prices aside. Perhaps it was imprudent of him to pursue three ambitious goals at once, for even the book’s supporters found it long and arduous. Nicholas Kaldor, a non-supporter whose review managed to misstate the book’s subtitle, called Prices I “mid-Victorian,” with its “leisurely repetitiousness, elaborate style, pompous exactitude, and . . . exhaustive scholarship,” reminding him “of the bourgeois solidity and spaciousness of that bygone age” (1939, pp. 495-6).²
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²Marget’s response (1942, p. vii): “I, on the contrary, rest my case on the proposition that if the qualities of ‘exactitude,’ ‘solidity,’ and ‘exhaustive scholarship’ are indeed characteristic only of a ‘bygone age,’ that fact constitutes a condemnation of our own age and a commentary on our current needs.”
—John B. Egger, “Arthur Marget in the Austrian Tradition of the Theory of Money,” Review of Austrian Economics 8, no. 2 (1995): 3-4, 4n.
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