Understanding Clarence Ayres’s criticism to an emerging mainstream and birthing institutionalism through the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate

Abstract

Clarence Ayres was a strong dissenting voice in US economics during the 20th century. In the 1930s, a debate between Ayres and Frank Knight was published by the International Journal of Ethics. Although the debate focused on ethics, the evolution of economics was also discussed. This paper proposes an understanding of Ayres’s ideas based on the context in which he made them. This context is defined by the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate and the archival correspondence between Ayres and Knight during the 1930s.