The American economist John Maurice Clark (1884-1963) is perhaps the best-known forerunner of the American economists who are sometimes referred to as the pragmatic school.

John Maurice Clark was born in Northampton, Mass. He graduated from nearby Amherst College in 1905 and did his graduate study in economics at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1910. He instructed at Colorado College (1908-1910) and at Amherst College (1910-1915) until he joined the faculty of political economy at the University of Chicago, where his colleagues included Jacob Viner and Frank Knight. In 1926 he left Chicago to accept a professorship at Columbia, where he remained until he retired in 1957, completing a half century of uninterrupted teaching and productive scholarship.

Clark's works, while primarily theoretical in content, were almost always directed toward clarifying and solving practical economic issues. He skillfully built his own analytical treatises upon the logic underlying the rigorously formulated...