The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw within economics the rise to intellectural ascendancy of 'marginalism': an approach to value, distribution and output wherein the theories of distribution and relative prices, output(s) and employment, are treated in terms of the mutual interactions of demands and supplies for commodities and 'factors of production', these supply-and-demand forces being understood to determine simultaneously all the relevant 'prices' and quantities. However, it is only much more recently, in the period since World War II, that it has become common-indeed, a commonplaceto characterise the collection of theories which embody this approach as 'neoclassical'. The term became prominent in the literature of economics in the 1950s, when it gained a wide currency in the debates on capital and growth (Dobb, 1973, p. 248). Joan Robinson's Collected Papers, for example, are liberally peppered with the term. To take another important example, Paul Samuelson's textbook, in its earliest editions, was a fairly modest project. But from the third edition, Samuelson (1955, p. vi) was presenting his now much expanded text as setting forth a 'grand neo-classical synthesis'-and using the term extensively throughout. (In the most recent editions the notion of the neoclassical synthesis is more muted, perhaps due to the decline in influence of just that synthesis of Keynes and marginalism which Samuelson championed.) Such a designation of marginalist economic theories evidently implies a continuity between those theories and classical economics. More precisely, the imputation of the concept of 'neoclassicism' implies both continuity and change: a positive, basic relation to the earlier classical theory and some development beyond it.There is more than one vantage point from which this view of marginalism and its relation to classical economics can be questioned. If one conceives a sharp theoretical disjunction between the classical and marginalist schools, then to that extent the term would appear a misnomer. It would then appear curious that such a characterisation of marginalism should arise. Within the ambit of this conception of a disjunction between the schools, at least two distinct attitudes could give rise to a repudiation of the appropriateness of the characterisation. One could, in the contrast, give the honours to the classics, and so see the term as falsely assimilating their (different) theories to the marginalist •Department of Economics, University of Sydney. I am grateful to Robert Dizon, Peter Groenewegen and Murray Milgate for helpful comments, without thereby implicating them in the final product. 0309-166X/86/030265 + 06 803.00/0