ABSTRACT
Alvin Saunders Johnson (1874-1971) was a noteworthy twentieth-century American economist. As one who wrote his doctoral dissertation at Columbia under John Bates Clark, later supervised the dissertation of Frank H.Knight at Cornell (a dissertation that became Risk, Uncertainty and Profits), and served as president of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1936, Alvin Johnson can be placed squarely in the American neoclassical economic mainstream. He attained high position in a fundamentally conservative discipline that prided itself on its scientific prowess, and that, frequently, celebrated the laissez-faire implications of its analytical models. Yet, in important respects, Johnson was not representative of the stereotypical dispassionate scientist, absorbed in manipulation of deductive models (under the cloak of scientific detachment) to the neglect of pressing social issues (that would have required “normative” emotionalism). Defiant of any disciplinary dogma that relied on the logical beauty of hypothesized market outcomes to achieve a social optimum, Johnson stands as an intriguing intellectual puzzle. He was both a master of the disciplinary core of equilibrium analysis, and a servant to humanitarian values-values which drove him to innovative and interventionist policy prescriptions that ranged far beyond the antiseptic analysis of his disciplinary home.
