Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman

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Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman (April 28, 1861 – July 8, 1939), American economist, was born at New York.

He was educated at Columbia University, and, after studying for three years in Germany and France, became prize lecturer at Columbia University in 1885, being made adjunct professor of political economy in 1888. He became McVickar professor of political economy in the same university in 1904.

An American convert to German Historicism, E.R.A. Seligman's institutional and historical approach to public finance led him to become one of the foremost authorities on taxation in economics. He was a campaigner for the progressive income tax system and one of the primary researchers on the incidence of taxation. He was also an excellent scholar of the history of economic thought, having been largely responsible for digging the "Dublin" proto-marginalists, (Richard Whately, Mountifort Longfield, Nassau Senior, William Forster Lloyd) out of obscurity (see his 1903 article).

Together with his more radical comrade-in-methodology, Richard T. Ely, he was one of the founders of the American Economic Association (AEA). While a historicist in method, and thus a founding father of American Institutionalism, Seligman was nonetheless sympathetic to both Marxian economics and Austrian economics. Seligman was one of the founders and organizers of the early New School for Social Research.

[edit] Publications

Railway Tariffs (1887)
The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation (1892; 3rd ed., 1910)
Progressive Taxation in Theory and Practice (1894; 2nd ed. 1908)
Economic Interpretation of History (1902; 2nd ed. 1907)
"On Some Neglected British Economists" (1903), EJ, repr. in Essays in Economics (1925)
Principles of Economics (1907).
"Economists", Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 1907
The Income Tax, 1911.
"Recent Reports on State and Local Taxation", 1911, AER
"Tax Exemption Through Tax Capitalization: A Reply", 1916, AER
"Who is the Twentieth Century Mandeville?", 1918, AER
"Are Stock Dividends Income?", 1919, AER
"The Cost of the War and How It Was Met", 1919, AER
Studies in Public Finance, 1925.
Essays in Economics, 1925.