Though Alfred Marshall, as early as 1941, had been declared “long dead” by Jacob Viner, it can hardly be denied that some of the major ideas developed in the Principles of Economics, the first edition of which appeared one century ago, are still at the core of modern economics.

One could easily pay tribute to the author who relabeled “political economy” as the now-familiar “economics” and who restructured a substantial part of the discipline according to a sequence that continues to organize our microeconomics textbooks: from consumption and production theories to market equilibrium and to the theory of distribution. But Marshall is now best remembered for his analysis of market forces at work from temporary to longrun equilibrium, with the associated cost functions and the correlated problems of the nature of the supply curve and of its intersection with the demand curve. Certainly these concepts have been reshaped and elegantly expressed in mathematical form. As far as the content is concerned, they remain a very substantial part of the hard core of economics.

Hence, Marshall's contribution is mostly identified with Book V of the Principles. Nevertheless, there has been renewed interest recently in other aspects of the magnum opus. Several authors (Ménard 1979; Moss 1982; Levine 1983; Mirowski 1984, 1989; Niman 1991; Thomas 1991; Hodgson in press) have reexamined some neglected contributions of Marshall; and most of them, because of the influential debate on the methodology of economics, devoted a great deal of attention to the analogies at work in the Principles.