CLARK’S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL 
CONCEPT 
Frank A. Fetter 
1. Statement of Clark’s Doctrine 
THE eightieth anniversary of the birth of John Bates Clark, 
our honored master in social philosophy, calls renewed attention 
to those economic issues in the discussion of which he has had a 
most vital part. 
As a humble contribution to the volume which his fellow 
economists here bring as token of their regard, I would essay to 
review Clark’s reformulation of the capital concept, and to trace 
its continuing influence upon economic opinion. No one can 
say what its total effect ultimately will be, but we may now form 
some judgment of its logie and of its aptness in practical dis- 
cussion, and of the measure of acceptance which it has up to the 
present attained in America and England. 
It is almost forty years since the publication of Clark’s mono- 
graph entitled Capital and Its Earnings." Hardly larger than 
a magazine article, (merely 61 pages of text) it is yet one of the 
important milestones in the history of American economic theory, 
and likewise marks significantly new interests and a new stage 
of development in Clark’s own thought. He was then in his 
forty-second year and had, since the age of thirty, been con- 
tributing toward “the reformulating of certain leading principles 
of economic science,” through occasional magazine articles. 
These were “republished with varying amounts of revision and 
the discussion extended” in his first book, The Philosophy of 
Wealth, in 1885. While the work of that decade shows Clark 
to be, in his own words, “in revolt against the spirit of the old 
political economy,” unsatisfied with its “defective” premises and 
its “degraded conception” of human nature (mere selfishness), 
and discontented with the actual relation of “capital” (the 
1 May, 1888, in Publications of the Amer. Econ. Asso., Vol. III, No. 2. 
136