In contrast to Keynes, however, and consistent with Marx, Marshall held that such a republic would develop and require "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.” (Marshall, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, p. 229)
In an 1889 article on "Cooperation,” 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.”
In an 1873 article, “The Future of the Working Classes,” he says that
“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 contrast to Marx, however, Marshall thought the development of the "working classes" required for the actualization of "ideal social republic of the future" would be brought about by the prior development of what he called "economic chivalry" among capitalists themselves who would then reform the conditions of the "working classes" in ways that would facilitate their development.
In some recently published lectures from the same early period, he, like Keynes and Marx, identifies the "ideal social republic" with "a time of perfect freedom, a perpetual Sunday, when work would be so entirely subordinated to what was important, to the growth of man and of his character".
“suppose you had told an intelligent man 100 years ago, that all manual labour would thus be dispensed with, he would have looked forward to a time of perfect freedom, a perpetual Sunday, when work would be so entirely subordinated to what was important, to the growth of man and of his character, that it would almost have been forgotten.” (Marshall, Alfred Marshall's Lectures to Women, edited by Tiziano Raffaelli, Eugenio F. Biagini and Rita McWilliams Tullberg, p. 92)
Finding and ameliorating the causes of lack of progress in this direction constituted one of the main motivations behind his study of political economy.
“I claim then to have shown what pressing reason there is for showing why the development of our arts of production has done so little to prevent the sacrifices of man to production. And it is not easy to see why the hopeful prophecy we imagined a man of a hundred years ago to have uttered has not yet come true. Why every day is not a Sunday, devoted to culture, with just so much work perhaps, as is necessary for the health of the body, with time to learn and to think, to be educated for science, and art.” (Marshall 1995, p. 95)
Ted