ABSTRACT
John Bates Clark (1847–1938) stands as “the foremost American contributor to the marginalist revolution in economic methodology” (Friedman 2021, 318; see also Ross 1991, 172–5). Working on lines parallel to Walras, Jevons and Marshall, he aims to organize a science of economics as a system comprising a small number of “fundamental laws” of economic life (Shotwell 1938, 239). Like Marshall he was an institution builder, one of the leading lights in the creation of the American Economic Association in 1885, including serving as its third president, and contributing to the development of the economics curriculum at Columbia and Johns Hopkins. Though best known for producing advances in economic theory that set the basis for “neoclassical economics” (Leonard, 2016, 25; Davanzati 2006, xiv, 46), the profession of economics remained a religious vocation for Clark. He nested his science within a natural theology, locating “the hand of divinity as did the Scottish classical tradition: providential design manifesting itself in the relatively harmonious way in which competition works to promote good social outcomes” (Leonard 2003, 551–2).
