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John Rae: The Lost Letters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Extract

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.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2001

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References

1 Mixter was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1867 and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1892. He earned a master's degree at Harvard in 1893. After spending two years studying in Germany he was awarded a doctorate in economics at Harvard in 1897. He was an assistant in economics at Harvard under the renowned Frank W. Taussig and beginning in 1897 gave graduate courses in the history of economic theory and in economic literature. Mixter was also an assistant in economics at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, from 1897 to 1900. It is likely that he was acquainted with William Lyon Mackenzie King who was one of Taussig's graduate students in 1897–98.

2 Vol. X, January, 1897, pp. 161–90.

3 Journals and Transactions of the Wentworth Historical Society, III, 102.

4 For details about Ann Cuthbert Rae, see Susan Mann's article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. IX.Google Scholar

5 James, R. Warren, John Rae, Political Economist …, I, p. 14.Google Scholar