Christoph Scheuplein
Herbert Spencer, William Hearn and Alfred Marshall on social evolution and spatial patterns of the economy
Pages 1 - 13

In contemporary regional economics and economic geography, Alfred Marshall is appreciated as the first economist who described and theorized economic clusters. However, his work has been one-sidedly reduced to his economic rational explorations of the emergence and success of industrial districts. Delving deeper reveals that Marshallwas deeply influenced by evolutionary thinking. For him, districts were an organizational pattern arising out of human evolution. Marshallwas also influenced by two other earlier scholars: Spencer and Hearn. The founder of socio-evolutionary theory, Herbert Spencer, had already used the spatial allocation of production activities as a important criteria to characterize societal development. William Hearn had integrated the socio-evolutionary terms of organization into economics in order to describe the macro-economy. Alfred Marshall borrowed their concepts and worked them into the wider framework of social science. Due to this, he gained insights into the contingency and the path dependency of spatial processes.h events in Germany.


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