“The Americans, and few more so than Henry Carey made political economy the beautiful science”
Another leading light of the American School was Friedrich List (1789-1846), a German émigré who developed and systematized a “national system” of economics that stressed the importance of industrialization in the emerging global economy. “To attain the highest degree of independence, culture and material prosperity,” List argued, a country “should adopt every measure within its power to defend its economic security.”''' (11) For the still-developing United States, this meant tariff-based protection and import substitution for the nation’s infant industries. Once the nation had industrialized, however, List’s system advised switching to a reciprocal trade strategy with other industrialized nations, cautiously opening American markets in exchange for access to others.
These were common themes of the American School: treating the nation—rather than the individual — as the principal unit of economic analysis and incorporating social and geo-political factors that today might seem beyond the scope of economics. The British “dismal science” could not satisfy the optimism and liberality of the still young American republic.
The American School struck its mid-century crescendo in the work of Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879). He warned that the purpose of British free trade policy was to “secur[e for] the people of England the … monopoly of machinery” and argued for an aggressive policy of support for infant industries to “break down this monopoly” and “restore the natural tendency” of balancing manufacturing with agriculture to support “stabler self-sufficient communities.”(12) “The Americans, and few more so than Henry Carey,” writes historian Gabor S. Boritt, “made political economy the beautiful science.” (13)