Arthur Latham Perry, 1830-1905.

American proto-marginalist economist, of the Catallactic School.

Born of in rural Lyme, New Hampshire, the son of a Congregationalist pastor of Scotch-Irish extraction.  Arthur Latham Perry childhood was constrained by poverty after the early death of his father just before his birth.  His mother a widow with few means, Perry began working early, supporting himself from the age of eleven.  Perry nonetheless found the wherewithal to attend college, enrolling at William College in Massachusetts, obtaining his BA in 1852.  After a year teaching at a school in Washington, DC, Perry returned as a tutor at Williams in 1853.  He was appointed professor of political economy and history at Williams College in 1854, a position he would retain until his death. 

In preparation for his lectures, Perry delved into the British classical literature.  His early lectures followed the Ricardian theory closely, but eventually (c.1863) achieved a conversion after coming across the work of Frederic Bastiat.  Discarding the Ricardian baggage, Perry embraced instead a "catallactic" perspective,  and  aligning him with the Oxford-Dublin school.  Arthur Latham Perry's Elements of Political Economy (1865), prepared as a college textbook to compete with Wayland's primer, was a reconstruction of economics from the catallactic perspective from its opening "Political economy is the science of exchanges, or what is exactly equivalent, the science of values" (p.1).  Perry discards classical cost theories of value, using "utility" instead, denounces the Matlhusian population doctrines, the wages fund and other classical Ricardian tenets.  The conversion is more complete is his two later volumes - the Introduction (1877), intended for high schools, and the Principles (1877), where the subject matter is reorganized so that the treatment of exchange and value precedes that of production (in contrast to the usual classical order).

Perry was an enthusiastic proponent of free trade, which put him at odds with the contemporary American mood for protectionism. Perry was involved with the Free Trade League, gave public lectures on trade across the country and engaged in debates with protectionist leaders like Horace Greeley. He made many enemies, but also some friends, notably Orrin Sage, a Massachusetts industrialist who endowed Perry's chair at Williams College after 1871.  Perry had also deep religious attachments, and preached frequently in local chapels.

As one of the few dedicated professors of economics in his time, Arthur L. Perry, was in a commanding position in American economics through the 1870s and into the 1880s, matched only perhaps by Francis Amasa Walker,  William G. Sumner at Yale and.C.F. Dunbar at Harvard. His Elements textbook was highly successful (it ran through 22 editions and was adopted in many colleges, including elite citadels like Yale).  However, as it turns out, Perry's long-run impact was limited, and he turned out not to be as influential as hoped or expected. Perry's economics was not carried on by a "school of thought".  This was partly because Perry remained faithfully at Williams College, a relative backwater.  His doctrinaire attachment to Manchester liberalism also made him suspect.  .But above everything, Perry's economics was too idiosyncratic - too distant from British classicism to be respectable, not nationalist enough to be embraced in America, and it was never really updated to account for new developments, like the Marginalist Revolution, making it of limited scientific interest.    Where Perry did have a decisive long-run imprint was in connecting the market system with Christian religious values, a feature that would permeate American apologism.

Perry was inherently a dedicated teacher rather than a scholar, and did not follow or follow up, on the revolution he began . His writing was limited to his textbooks, and he did not really engage other academics in the reviews and journals.  After retiring from teaching in 1891, Perry's interests drifted to parochial local history.

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