Journal of the History of Economic Thought

Table of Contents - September 2001 - Volume 23, Issue 03  

Research Article

John Rae: The Lost Letters

R. Warren James

Charles Whitney Mixter started a minor controversy when he published an article, “A Forerunner of Böhm-Bawerk,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1897, in which he suggested that John Rae had anticipated some aspects of Böhm-Bawerk's theory of capital. At this time, not much was known in academic circles about Rae's life in Canada except for the remark in the preface to his 1834 book, Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy …: “I exchanged the literary leisure of Europe for the solitude and labors of the Canadian backwoods.”