Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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DINNER IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR JOHN BATES CLARK 363 new points of view that they have engaged the attention of succeeding generations of students in the universities of this country and of other lands. Critics of the negative sort have searched for defects, have found fAaws, have blamed him because he did not solve all the other problems besides those that he did elucidate. But I have been a critic only in the positive and friendly sense, gathering nuggets of wisdom from his rich mine of ideas. Controversial matters should not engage our attention tonight; but if I might select from Professor Clark’s contributions some candidates for the Hall of Fame of Economic Theory, I should name, first, his part in the reconstruction of the capital concept, the lessons of which are not yet fully appreciated. It is still influencing the reconstruction and reformation of economic thought. I should name, second, his universal law of economic variation, with its unifying effect upon the whole conception of economic theory. Then, if among various others I were to name a third, it probably would be his contribution to the theory of monopoly. That was a pioneer work, a work done at a time when, as many of you well remember, all men were groping. We know more of that subject today, and this is due largely to his leadership. I have, however, mainly to speak tonight as the representative of the great guild of American economists. Here is not a field for controversy; here enter no disputes. I would refer only to those things on which the economists of America can unite without a dissenting voice. First we would honor the guest of this evening as a model of the newer and better standards of economic criticism. Anyone who knows even a little of the history of economic thought, must realize that some time in the last decades of the nineteenth century there appeared a finer spirit of economic analysis. In large part the economic literature of earlier periods was partisan in its concern with practical affairs, and motivated by pecuniary objects. Then, from among a little group of men, well represented by the Austrian school, there began to come essays of a finer, abstract, disinter- ested type of pure economics. It was purer in its intellectual quality and purer in the ethical sense, purer in the sense of being the search for truth for truth’s sake. Bohm-Bawerk is a good representative; Wieser is a somewhat better representative; but the peer of them all is Clark. To him we owe most in America for that better approach that now is made toward a finer, scientific spirit in this most difficult of all fields where thought is so easily colored with human interest, with selfishness and with prejudice. We that are members of the American Economic Association honor Pro- fessor Clark as our one outstanding personality of international reputation in the theoretical field. It is a paradox to European scholars that we should have produced such a man. They expect and they accept from America her manifold achievements in the practical field; but that here, out of practical America, there should have come an abstract theorist, rivalling and surpassing the best they could produce in the last three quarters of a century, is still a puzzle, a real mystery to them. The work of Professor Clark has gained an assured place in the world of economic

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