ABSTRACT
During the decade of the 1880s, more striking new departures occurred in American economics than in any other comparable period. At that time the conflict between the established Ricardian laissez-faire orthodoxy and the newly imported German historical ideas reached its climax; a wave of public interest in economic problems provided the opportunity for several able young men-who came to dominate American economics for the next three or four decades-to obtain their first professorial appointments; the academic economists, as a body, slowly but surely were divesting themselves of the accumulated propaganda and theological trappings of their subject, and securing its recognition as the leading independent social science discipline; the first professional economic journals appeared, and the foundation of the American Economic Association on September 9, 1885, approximately the mid-point of the decade, symbolized the birth of an indigenous national tradition of economic scholarship.2
