ABSTRACT
A brief survey of contemporary introductory textbooks in economics indicates that the classification of the factors of production utilized by classical political economists has been retained. To land, labor, and capital these texts occasionally add entrepreneurship. Political economists of the late nineteenth century were uniformly concerned with social questions of land and land ownership. The position of land in theories of value and distribution had been debated for many years prior to Harry Gunnison Brown's entrance into economic studies. The debate on the significance of land in economic theory was enlivened with the publication of Clark's The Distribution of Wealth in 1899 and Frank A. Fetter's articles in the American Economics Association Publications and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. When Brown began his academic career, the question of the place of land in economic theory was far from resolved. Several more contributions to the debate were yet to be made, usually in connection with capital theory, methodology, or simply terminology.
