John Bates Clark and the Normative Foundations of Early Neoclassicism

Modern scholars of the history of economic thought recognise that John Bates Clark’s earlier works bear far less formal abstraction and, instead, fervently appeal for economic reforms that are inspired by Protestant ethics and German Historicism. After the violent Haymarket incident in Chicago in 1886, Clark is assumed to have entirely dismissed his preoccupation with social reforms and ethics. We provide a counterpoint to this common understanding by finding out that Clark’s originally ethical impetus persists throughout his writings beyond Haymarket. The striking parallelism of his earlier ideas on moral progress and the role of Protestant ethics herein and his later model of natural evolution and entrepreneurial change allow us to characterise Clark’s economics as persistently reformative in character. Further, his application of marginalism must not be understood as purely deductive analysis. Instead, it shows the ideal of an economy that performs analogously to a coherent organism. Clark’s theory of value and distribution is found to build substantially on his reformative claim that the American economy should be founded on a principle of equal and voluntary exchange. This republican idea of the economy is integrated into an ontological reflection of the very preconditions of social wealth.