THE POLITICAL ECONOMY CLUB: A NEGLECTED EPISODE IN AMERICAN ECONOMIC THOUGHT.

During 1880's, more striking new departures occurred in the U.S. economics than in any other comparable period. At that time the conflict between the established laissez-faire orthodoxy and the newly imported German historical ideas, reached its climax. A wave of public interest in economic problems provided an opportunity for several able young men who came to dominate the U.S. economics for the next three or four decades to obtain their first professorial appointments. Academic economists, as a body, slowly but surely divested themselves of the accumulated propaganda and theological trappings of their subject and secured its recognition as the leading independent social science discipline. The first professional economic journals appeared and the foundation of the American Economic Association on September 9, 1885, approximately the midpoint of the decade, symbolized the birth of an indigenous national tradition of economic scholarship. Although the concluding stages of this long period of gestation have repeatedly been subjected to close scrutiny, the process is intrinsically so interesting that it would be unwise to neglect any new evidence, which has a bearing on it.