John Bates Clark: the first American marginalist as a social economist

Abstract

We analyze the content of four articles by John Bates Clark published between 1878 and 1887, during his Christian Socialist period in order to show that next to the marginalist Clark and beyond the neoclassical principles outlined in The Distribution of Wealth, the whole Clark’s work is a strongly coherent body, deeply rooted in positions less extreme than the ones held by more reformer-minded economists like Richard T. Ely or John R. Commons containing an array of different contributions to political economy displaying a certain originality and coherence, and enrolling in a thematic environment that today would be broadly defined as social economy. In particular, the main ideas emerging from this selection of papers are his organismic idea of society, the role of moral forces in shaping economic activity, and his promotion of profit sharing and cooperation as better regimes for production and distribution with respect to competition.