America's Alternative to Marshall: Property, Competition, and Capitalism in Hadley's Economics of 1896

American dominance of the discipline of economics in the present century is beyond dispute. In terms of Nobel prizes and the creative ideas that spawned them, academic economists working in the United States have an incomparable record. As all who study the history of economic thought know, this was not always the case. Indeed, most histories of thought, when dealing with the nineteenth century, leave the impression that little of merit was done outside the British Isles. But Alfred Marshall's Principles was not the only “basic book†of merit to be published at the crest of nineteenth-century neoclassicism. It was possibly not even the most prescient work.