Friedrich August von Hayek, [Review of John Bates Clark. A Memorial] (May 1939)

Hayek’s journal book review of the privately printed John Bates Clark. A Memorial combines an appreciation of Clark’s character with a small contribution to the history of economic thought. Its movement is from Clark’s reputation and personal influence to an unpublished letter documenting his relationship to Austrian value theory, followed by a qualification concerning the controversy over capital. Hayek’s central concern is to recover the teacher and intellectual colleague behind a reputation that had become remote or misleading for younger European economists.

Clark, who died in March 1938 at ninety-one, had become almost legendary on Hayek’s side of the Atlantic. Some knew him chiefly as a modern Bastiat, supposedly a final defender of the natural harmony of economic forces. Hayek identifies this as a misinterpretation without undertaking a theoretical rebuttal. He instead distinguishes that caricature from Clark’s achievement in developing and firmly establishing marginal productivity analysis, which places him among the founders of modern economic theory. A fuller assessment belongs to a future historian; the memorial’s immediate value lies in bringing Clark’s personality into view.

But we all should be grateful for this charming memorial to John Bates Clark the man, one of the most lovable and wise among the teachers of his generation, as one who knew him well during his last year of active teaching can testify.

The personal testimony gives Hayek’s praise a specific basis. Clark’s importance was not confined to published theory: his generosity toward younger scholars helped shape their scientific careers. Hayek presents the memorial as a means of communicating that experience to readers who never met him. The review therefore treats the transmission of economic knowledge through teaching and guidance as part of Clark’s historical significance.

Its documentary contribution is a letter to Robert Zuckerkandl, dated January 14, 1890, written after the appearance of Zuckerkandl’s book on price theory. Clark sent an early article on value and explained the circumstances of its composition:

At the time of the publication, in 1881, I was a young teacher in one of our western colleges; and I actually thought that I was the original discoverer of the principles expressed in the article. The analysis was written quite a long time before it was published.

This recollection records Clark’s original belief in his independent discovery, rather than establishing a claim to priority. Hayek supplies the letter as biographical evidence, not as a reconstruction of the precise relationship between Clark’s analysis and earlier theories. Its force comes from the contrast between Clark’s youthful understanding of his achievement and his subsequent willingness to acknowledge predecessors.

P.S.—Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to render full honour to the eminent thinkers, mainly Austrians, who were earlier in this field than myself, and who have carried their analysis to greater lengths.

The acknowledgment supports the review’s portrait of intellectual generosity while giving it a concrete transatlantic setting. Hayek closes by distinguishing theoretical disagreement from personal relations: despite the lively controversy over capital theory, Clark’s relations with the Austrians were cordial once established shortly before the war. Some economists of the Austrian School’s second or third generation, he adds, owed nearly as much to Clark’s teaching as to their immediate teachers. The review’s enduring relevance lies in this conjunction of doctrinal distinction and personal indebtedness. Clark appears both as a major theoretical innovator and as a formative teacher whose influence crossed the boundaries of schools.