Economic Currents
To the Editor:
May I be allowed a footnote to Professor C. E. Ayres’s review of my Main Currents in Modern Economics [April]? The fortuitous juxaposition in the book of Veblen and the Austrian marginal utility economists impelled him to suggest that in my view the latter was a response to the Institutionalist critique of received doctrine. This, of course, would be quite wrong and no such idea was intended. In fact, marginalist theory had already become common coin by the time Veblen began to write, and it was he who reacted against the Austrians. But it is true that much of the motivation underlying the latter’s brand of economics stemmed from a felt need to rebut Marxism. This was certainly so with Bühm-Bawerk and a number of lesser lights among the marginalists; and the furious debates between Otto Bauer and Joseph Schumpeter during their student days in Vienna testify to the manner in which Marxian theory must have challenged the new traditionalists.
Ben B. Seligman
Washington, D. C.
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