ABSTRACT
This chapter describes detail at samples of writing drawn from John Bates Clark, according to the New Palgrave, ‘American economist to deserve and gain an international reputation’ and at a piece of writing by Alfred Marshall, in order to highlight both the John Ruskinian influences and the changed climate of opinion concerning the cultural significance of economic theory. An examination of the life-experiences of William Smart has illustrated in detail, for one distinguished, mainstream, though overlooked, British economist, that Ruskinian thinking interpenetrated practical and theoretical discussion of economics in the final decades of what some historians refer to as the long nineteenth century. The significance of biographical facts arises from their historicity and may be contrasted with the sense of a historical necessity which can be associated with the idea of the linear development of science from error to truth, at least in some versions of the history of economic thought.
