Alfred Marshall, Keynes’s teacher at Cambridge, took over from Hegel and Marx the ideas of “being” as a system of internal relations and of “human being” as the potentially “universally developed individual”. His ideas of “ceteris paribus” and “normal” are underpinned by these ontological and anthropological ideas.
As in Marx, they underpin his conception of the labour process as playing a key role in the development of those subjected to it.
“Man's character has been moulded by his every-day work, and the material resources which he thereby procures, more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals; and the two great forming agencies of the world's history have been the religious and the economic. ... Religious motives are more intense than economic, but their direct action seldom extends over so large a part of life. For the business by which a person earns his livelihood generally fills his thoughts during by far the greater part of those hours in which his mind is at its best; during them his character is being formed by the way in which he uses his faculties in his work, by the thoughts and the feelings which it suggests, and by his relations to his associates in work, his employers or his employees.
“And very often the influence exerted on a person's character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned. ... It is true that in religion, in the family affections and in friendship, even the poor may find scope for many of those faculties which are the source of the highest happiness. But the conditions which surround extreme poverty, especially in densely crowded places, tend to deaden the higher faculties. Those who have been called the Residuum of our large towns have little opportunity for friendship; they know nothing of the decencies and the quiet, and very little even of the unity of family life; and religion often fails to meet them. No doubt their physical, mental, and moral ill-health is partly due to other causes than poverty: but this is the chief cause. (Principles, Variorum Ed., vol. 1, pp. 1-2)
"the normal condition of many of the very poorest inhabitants of a large town is to be devoid of enterprise, and unwilling to avail themselves of the opportunities that may offer for a healthier and less squalid life elsewhere; they have not the strength, physical, mental and moral, required for working their way out of their miserable surroundings. The existence of a considerable supply of labour ready to make match-boxes at a very low rate is normal in the same way that a contortion of the limbs is a normal result of taking strychnine. It is one result, a deplorable result, of those tendencies the laws of which we have to study. This illustrates one peculiarity which economics shares with a few other sciences, the nature of the material of which can be modified by human effort. Science may suggest a moral or practical precept to modify that nature and thus modify the action of laws of nature." (Principles, vol. 1, pp. 35-6)
In an early essay "The Future of the Working Classes" (Memorials of Alfred Marshall, pp. 101-18), he implicitly adopts Marx’s idea of labour in capitalism as "alienated". He points to
"that darker scene which the lot of unskilled labour presents. Let us look at those vast masses of men who, after long hours of hard and unintellectual toil, are wont to return to their narrow homes with bodies exhausted and with minds dull and sluggish. That men do habitually sustain hard corporeal work for eight, ten or twelve hours a day, is a fact so familiar to us that we scarcely realize the extent to which it governs the moral and mental history of the world; we scarcely realize how subtle, all-pervading and powerful may be the effect of the work of man's body in dwarfing the growth of the man." (Memorials, pp. 105-6)
"man ought to work in order to live, his life, physical, moral, and mental, should be strengthened and made full by his work. But what if his inner life be almost crushed by his work? Is there not then suggested a terrible truth by the term working man, when applied to the unskilled labourer – a man whose occupation tends in a greater or less degree to make him live for little save for that work that is a burden to bear?" (Memorials, p. 108)
In another early essay, he claims that:
"in the world's history there has been no waste product, so much more important than all others, that it has a right to be called THE Waste Product. It is the higher abilities of many of the working classes; the latent, the undeveloped, the choked-up and wasted faculties for higher work, that for lack of opportunity have come to nothing." (Memorials, p. 229)
He explicitly criticizes the classical theory of wages on the ground that it ignores the fact that social relations are internal relations so that predictions of the consequences of changes in wages and other conditions of work have to take account of their developmental effects.
“For the sake of simplicity of argument, Ricardo and his followers often spoke as though they regarded man as a constant quantity, and they never gave themselves enough trouble to study his variations. … It caused them to speak of labour as a commodity without staying to throw themselves into the point of view of the workman; and without dwelling upon the allowances to be made for his human passions, his instincts and habits, his sympathies and antipathies, his want of knowledge and of the opportunities for free and vigorous action. They therefore attributed to the forces of supply and demand a much more mechanical and regular action than is to be found in real life: and they laid down laws with regard to profits and wages hat did not really hold even for England in their own time.” (Principles, vol. 1, pp. 762-3)
Ted