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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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Clark's reformulation of the capital concept / Frank A. Fetter

Collection:: Economics Books

CLARK'S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL CONCEPT 141 artificial, produced, goods and to include as capital anything (or at least its value) that is the durable foundation of a use that has value. Very similar ideas were developed by Carl Rodbertus in the thirties and forties, most significant because of the great influence they exercised upon later thinkers in the period of developing German state socialism after 1870. Especially Adolf Wagner acknowledged his profound indebtedness to Rodbertus.® To Wagner is due the much wider circulation and influence in the last quarter of a century of these ideas which he restated and endorsed.” Wagner credits Rodbertus with “the essential dis- tinction between capital in the purely economic sense as any stock of material agents and means of production, and capital in the historico-legal sense as capital-possessions.” He cites the state- ment of Knies that political economy uses capital in two senses, as concrete means of production, and as a stock of goods acquired by an owner. Both Wagner and Knies recognize the double meaning of capital as a tool in economic processes (technological sense) and as a source of private income (acquisitive sense), the distinction on which so much of the thought of Thorstein Veblen as well as of Karl Marx, seems to have been based. When Knies says approvingly that what has been called capital is “funda- mentally nothing but a mere abstraction,” * the expression might be the original of Clark’s “entity,” “this abstract conception of capital.” * Clark, in common with all other Americans pursuing graduate economic studies in Germany, must have become familiar with these ideas. Yet why did no trace of them ever appear in the writings of other students returning from Germany, or even in Clark’s writings, until 1888? Is not the explanation to be found in the fact that Americans went abroad with minds already cast in the mold of the Ricardian-Mill “orthodox” scheme of dis- tributive theory, and these concepts persisted. It was possible for these students to acquire a zeal for displacing (or for supple- ' The ideas of Rodbertus on capital are scattered throughout his writ- ings, but perhaps more systematically presented in his work Das Kapital, written 1850-51 but published first in 1885 by A. Wagner and T. Kozak. (Known to the writer only in the French translation, Paris, 1904.) * See Wagner's Grundlegung, 3rd. ed., 1892, p. 307 ff. * Knies, op. cit., p. 43. ‘ Clark, op. cit., p. 11.

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