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Modern scholars of the history of economic thought recognise that John Bates Clark’s earlier works bear far less formal abstraction and, instead, fervently appeal for economic reforms that are inspired by Protestant ethics and German Historicism. After the violent Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886, Clark is assumed to have entirely dismissed his preoccupation with social reforms and ethics. We provide a counterpoint to this common understanding by finding out that Clark’s originally ethical impetus persists throughout his writings beyond Haymarket. The striking parallelism of his earlier ideas on moral progress and the role of Protestant ethics herein and his later model of natural evolution and entrepreneurial change allow us to characterise Clark’s economics as persistently reformative in character. Further, his application of marginalism must not be understood as purely deductive analysis. Instead, it shows the ideal of an economy that performs analogously to a coherent organism. Clark’s theory of value and distribution is found to build substantially on his reformative claim that the American economy should be founded on a principle of equal and voluntary exchange. This republican idea of the economy is integrated into an ontological reflection of the very preconditions of social wealth.

Major concern over monopolies and trusts was one of the distinguishing marks of the American Economic Association from its foundation and lasted well into the early 1900s (Coats, 1960). The failed merger attempt of the Northern Securities Company and the subsequent panic of 1902–1903, the 1907 financial crisis and its aftermath, as well as the ostensibly illegal financial practices of many conglomerates, all contributed to keep the trusts issue alive on academic circles. But it was only after the 1911 Court decisions that the debate on the trust problem and the necessary measures to amend the existing antitrust legislation acquired new vigor and incisiveness.³

In a recent paper (Fiorito & Vernengo, 2009), the present writers have dealt with John Maurice Clark's contribution to macroeconomics in the 1930s with a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on its relationship to the Keynesian revolution. The general framework of Clark's aggregate analysis can be traced in a series of scattered contributions centering on the efficacy and consequences of countercyclical fiscal policy. Albeit offering a qualified support for a program of public works, Clark was concerned with the inflationary consequences of Keynesian policies, once the economy approached full employment. Clark was also dissatisfied with those interpretations of the income flow analysis, which came to be known as “Hydraulic Keynesianism” that led to the development of the so-called neoclassical synthesis.

In the US minimum wages were initially enacted by individual states, beginning with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1912. These laws were modeled on legislation enacted over the previous two decades in Australia, New Zealand, and England (Fisher, 1926, chap. 8; Hammond, 1915, 1913; Hobson, 1915; Hart, 1994, chaps. 2 & 3; Morris, 1986). From 1912 to 1923, the legislatures of 16 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia passed minimum wage legislation, although not all of them were operational by the end of this period (Brandeis, 1935, p. 501; Clark, 1921; Millis & Montgomery, 1938, chap. 6; Morris, 1930, chap. 1).

According to Clark (1935a, b), if the various studies on the secondary effects of public works expenditures are examined, two main approaches to the analysis of the problem are revealed: “one via successive cycles of income and spending by ultimate recipients of income” – which the Columbia economist termed the “Kahn-Keynes” approach – “the other via the volume of money and its velocity of circulation.” As is well known, in the first approach, business fluctuations are seen primarily as a consequence of fluctuations in current investment. Accordingly, the amount of the secondary effects is determined by: (a) the amount of the net increase in investment; (b) the marginal propensity to consume; and (c) the length of the income propagation period. As it appears from the above, in the “Kahn-Keynes” analysis of the secondary expansion, money plays only a passive role.

Kendall P. Cochran has claimed that John Maynard Keynes “developed a theory that would try ‘to account for things as they are’. In so doing he became another important social economist.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to participate in this special session to honour George F. Rohrlich, social economist. It is with a sense of humility that I accept this pleasant undertaking. George Rohrlich has taught, written, helped others to write, published, helped others to publish and edited works on different aspects of social economics. I attempt here to put together a few observation on the nature of social economics as revealed in his writings. This attempt is by its very nature a modest one. For, how can one do justice to the work of a man who has to his credit a dozen major works (books or monographs) and almost five dozen other writings (articles, papers, notes) not all of them in English? I do not, therefore, even pretend to take a comprehensive view of Rohrlich, the social economist.

The initial response to the crisis of the corporate‐welfare state is nativistic: “Give us that old time religion”. In almost every democratic industrial society, retrenchment has become the primary motive of social economic policy. In the name of nineteenth‐century economic wisdom, the inter‐war and post‐war commitment to human development, collective goals, and social justice is being abandoned. In this article I examine the current institutional crisis in an attempt to show that it is rooted in the holdover of an outmoded ideology and culture that has as its concomitant result a profound ideological lacuna. The implication of my argument is that it is not the last half‐century's social economic goals that should be abandoned but rather the nineteenth century folkways and folklore that frustrate their achievement and advocate their abandonment.

The paper published below was prepared by Taylor Ostrander for Frank Knight’s course, Economic Theory, Economics 301, during the Fall 1933 quarter.