The Long Rehabilitation of Frank Fetter

The theme of this paper is rehabilitation, in the sense of repairing a reputation and restoring it to a rightful place of prominence. Economics has long history of rehabilitations, including W.H. Hutt’s rehabilitation of Say’s law, and Alfred Marshall’s attempt to rehabilitate David Ricardo. The rehabilitation of Frank A. Fetter is as important as either of these, especially for economists working in the contemporary Austrian tradition. The historical records reveal that for the last century there has been underway a nearly unbroken series of efforts, especially by Austrian economists, to rehabilitate Fetter’s contributions and use them to revitalize economic theory. It is my aim to relate this history, which chronicles the rise, decline, and rise again of one of the great American economic theorists. Yet crucially, this is not a story about Fetter alone, but also of the fortunes of the Austrian school and its rise, decline, and renaissance