The theory of government failure was developed as a reaction against Pigovian welfare economics and the Cambridge approach to economic policy analysis generally, which ostensibly lacked a theory of governmental behaviour. We argue that the Cambridge tradition--as reflected in the writings of Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall and A.C. Pigou--evidences a clear sense of the potential limitations and inefficiencies of the political process that were later developed, albeit in a more systematic fashion, in the government failure literature and at the same time bring out the ways in which the Cambridge and contemporary government failure approaches diverge, in spite of their strong similarities. Copyright The Authors 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.