Full text: Economic essays

360 
APPENDIX 
Re TT es 
of expression, of style; the clarity of it charmed everyone who dipped into 
its pages. But more than that, it was, as President Butler has so truly 
said, the work of a philosopher, a man who took a broad view of every- 
thing that his mind encountered and who could not be content with 
merely marshalling facts and drawing the ordinary inductions from them. 
It was the work of a man who had seen that the whole subject of values 
needed complete revisualization and restatement, and who having under- 
taken so to view it, had stated all the fundamental problems of economic 
theory with such thoroughness, with such originality, that all who became 
interested perceived at once that here was a leader of thought, destined to 
work great reconstructions in our scientific view of the industrial life of our 
time, and of economic theory and of social progress, in general. 
The remark has often been made that Professor Clark’s work has been a 
masterpiece of lucid abstraction. We usually make a mistake when we so 
interpret him. He has given us abstractions, that is true, but not the 
abstractions which come when one starts from premises abstract to begin 
with, and by logical deduction creates a framework into which he brings 
concrete facts by way of illustration and exemplification. Professor Clark’s 
work has been something entirely different. 
From earliest manhood his mind has been informed and enriched with 
concrete material, with knowledge of the world in which he lives; and 
his abstractions, far from being a mere logical framework, have been an 
essence distilled from the concrete facts with which he has been familiar and 
with which he has worked. That is why his work has had such marvelous 
vitality. That is why it has charmed men. That is why it has caught 
attention and held it. 
His interest from the time of our first acquaintance has lain in further 
development of the views at which he had then arrived. He was already 
busy with the problem of the limitations of competition which he saw 
arising on every hand, with the problem of what, in those days, was called 
the “pool” and was beginning to be called the “trust,” the problem of 
combination. He was already forecasting restatements of fundamental 
theory, the theory of value, the theory of production, the theory of dis- 
tribution, to which he was destined to make enduring contributions. 
I remember distinctly an afternoon when we drove from Northampton to 
Amherst, when we went over a plan which he had outlined and which he 
presented to me, that he and I should write certain complementary articles, 
which we afterwards did. These were published in the Political Science 
Quarterly, and afterwards as a small book on The Modern Distributive 
Process. One article dealt with the limitations of competition, another with 
the persistence of competition; one dealt with the concrete facts and the 
theory of profits, another with the concrete facts and the theory of wages. 
That writing was the beginning of efforts which led Professor Clark on in 
one direction, and led me on perhaps in another direction ; but, as our 
Chairman has said complimentarily, it was in a sense cooperative work. 
A characteristic feature of economic theory at that time was its academic 
quality. Professor Clark was working along lines which many men thought 
were simply a projection of Professor Jevons’ concept of “final degree of
	        
Waiting...

Note to user

Dear user,

In response to current developments in the web technology used by the Goobi viewer, the software no longer supports your browser.

Please use one of the following browsers to display this page correctly.

Thank you.