Foreshadowing Alvin S. Johnson’s Activism in His Early Neoclassical Economic Writings

Doug Campbell, University of North Texas

Alvin Saunders Johnson lived a long and productive life. He was born and raised on a Nebraska farm, and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska. He completed a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia University in 1902, studying under E.R.A. Seligman and John Bates Clark, his advisor and a strict Neoclassicist. Also a Neoclassicist, Johnson would later sympathize with the Institutionalist approach to economics associated with Thorstein Veblen. Johnson’s career as an educator included professorships at several universities, and was co-founder and long-time director of The New School, and championed adult continuing education. He lobbied for and tirelessly worked to establish university research positions in the U.S. for European intellectual exiles during Hitler’s regime, establishing among other things, the “University in Exile.” Johnson was a humanitarian, advocating a liberal democratic approach to social and economic justice. During his long career he edited the Political Science Quarterly (PSQ), the New Republic, and the monumental Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. His doctoral dissertation, “Rent in Modern Economic Theory: An Essay in Distribution,” was published in 1903. In 1909, he published Introduction to Economics, becoming a standard textbook in undergraduate courses, and was eventually revised in 1911 and 1922, and last reprinted in 1971. I propose to discover whether Johnson’s approach to social and economic justice was foreshadowed in the Introduction to Economics. This will require a close reading and textual analysis of Introduction to Economics, as well as his book reviews and articles from PSQ in the first decade of the 20th century. Background and secondary sources will be supplemented by Johnson’s later work, including his 1952 autobiography. Finally, an examination of additional historical literature will situate Johnson’s work in the Progressive Era, as well as highlight the history of higher education and social sciences during the same period.

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 Presented in Session 7. Intellectual Histories and Theoretical Trajectories