Justice & Law Quote by Alfred Marshall

Marshall’s “material goods” quietly smuggles a legal brief into what sounds like a simple inventory list. He’s not talking about piles of stuff; he’s talking about the invisible architecture that makes “stuff” economically real: rights. Owning a factory, leasing it, holding shares in it, collecting rents from it, or having a contract that delivers it later all count as “goods” in his frame. That move is deliberate. It lets economics treat property, credit, and contracts not as side issues handled by lawyers, but as core components of wealth.

The intent is definitional, but the subtext is a power move: value is as much about enforceable claims as it is about physical objects. A ton of coal is a “thing”; the right to mine, transport, sell, or profit from that coal is the actual economic lever. By bundling present possession with future entitlements (“to receive them at a future time”), Marshall is also making room for modern capitalism’s signature feature: wealth that lives in promises. Bonds, mortgages, insurance payouts, dividends, futures contracts - these aren’t abstractions in his system; they’re material goods because they function like assets and shape behavior like assets.

Context matters. Marshall is writing as industrial Britain turns property into paper, and paper into power: joint-stock companies, expanding finance, and widening inequality. His definition anticipates a world where the headline question isn’t “Who has the things?” but “Who has the rights?” It’s a clinical sentence with a political edge: if economics counts rights as goods, then the distribution of rights becomes the real distribution of “material” life.