The anti-free trade American Economic Association was formed in 1885, 23 of the fifty five members were protestant clergymen

Tim Leonard writes, a short excerpt from his powerpoint work:

www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Excluding.ppt‎

"A key formative experience of the AEA’s core group – graduate education in Germany.
Bismarkian Germany gave the young Americans exposure to the ideas of the German Historical School, with its positive view of state economic intervention, and its hostility to the idea of natural economic laws, what it disparaged as “English” economics.
Their German university professors, men like Adolph Wagner, Johannes Conrad and Gustav Schmoller were, moreover, accorded respect and authority and they were consulted on important matters of national economic policy.
The example of their German professors permitted the young American graduate students to imagine careers as yet non-existent in the United States – academic advocates with expert influence upon economic policy.
The young American economists’ experience in Germany gave shape and direction, however, to a reform impulse already strong in them.
The progressive economists’ desire to set the world to rights was powered by a quintessentially American phenomenon, an evangelical Protestant reform movement known as social Christianity, or the social Gospel."

They opposed the Mengerian economists of laissez-faire profession.

http://www.solopassion.com/node/9925

The anti-free trade American Economic Association was formed in 1885, 23 of the fifty five members were protestant clergymen

The anti-free trade American Economic Association was formed in 1885, 23 of the fifty five members were protestant clergymen

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