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The question of whether, and to what extent, Chicago price theory is Marshallian is a large one, with many aspects. The theory of individual behavior is one of these, and the treatment of altruism, or, more generally, other-regarding behavior, falls within this domain. This chapter explores the analysis of other-regarding behavior in the work of Alfred Marshall and Gary Becker with a view to drawing out the similarities and differences in their respective approaches. What emerges is sense that we find in Becker’s work important commonalities with Marshall but also significant points of departure and that the line from Marshall to modern Chicago is neither as direct as it is sometimes portrayed, nor as faint as it is sometimes claimed by Chicago critics.

I. Introduction to the Study of the Economic Role of Government: Alternative Approaches to Law and Economics

The first issue that requires examination is the question of how we got to this point to begin with. The answer to this question, of course, is a function of who “we” happens to be. The lawyers can blame Oliver Wendell Holmes (1897, p. 469), who made “the man of the future … the man of statistics and the master of economics.” The future, it would seem, is now. Legal Realist/Institutionalist lawyer-economists such as Walton Hamilton and Robert Lee Hale, who were economists on law school faculties before that tradition got started at Chicago, had something to do with this too, although neither they nor law-minded economists such as John R. Commons can be given credit or blame for the economic analysis of law – at least not directly.³ The birth of the economic analysis of law is very much a Chicago story – Coase, Becker, and Posner – although we must allow that Guido Calabresi also had more than a bit to do with these things.⁴

X = multiple interpretations

The very subject of this roundtable and published symposium suggests that there is something going on, some smoke, here – that there is some distinction that scholars past and present have found it useful to make, legitimately or not, between American institutionalism on the one hand and, say, classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, and Austrian economics in the interwar period. One problem, of course, is that examining how “x” is different from “y” requires a specification of both what constitutes “x” and what constitutes “y.” Put another way, figuring out what constitutes “institutionalism” simultaneously requires defining “not institutionalism,” both in toto and its constituent elements. This is not an easy task when even the question of what it means to be “Keynesian” admits to no small number of (or even consistent) answers. And indeed, one could just as well ask whether “neoclassical” is useful as an historiographic category during this period.¹