ABSTRACT

For the historian of economic thought, John Maurice Clark stands as an intriguing intellectual puzzle. On the one hand, he was among the most active promoters of American institutionalism during the interwar years. Together with Walton H. Hamilton, Clark participated in the 1918 AEA conference, which marked the formal public launching of the movement in the United States under that title. On that occasion he presented the paper ‘Economic Theory in an Era of Social Readjustment’, calling for an economic science both ‘actively relevant to the issues of its time’ and able to furnish the student ‘with tools of thought rather than with the finished product; with knowledge of the general features of the institutions he is studying; and with principles of a widely varying sort, embodying many ways in which business affects human desires, directly and indirectly’ (Clark, 1919, p. 290). On the other hand, John Maurice Clark never fully rejected John Bates Clark’s theoretical contribution. He denied any discontinuity between his father’s two major works, The Philosophy of Wealth and The Distribution of Wealth,2 and saw himself as attempting to continue his efforts to develop a dynamic theory.3 As he once put it in a letter to Professor Maurice Roche-Agussoll in 1918, he was aiming at developing a ‘dynamic social or institutional economics or realistic economics’. This to him was the third division of the field of economics. The first two, which composed ‘value economics’, were ‘1) Static value – or price – economics’ and ‘2) dynamic value – or price – economics.’4