An interest in the history of ideas has never been popular in the United States; the modern student finds a tabula rasa in all fields of social science. The late Vernon L. Parrington complained of “the present lack of exact knowledge in connection with the history of American letters”). Charles E. Merriam observed that the “development of American political theories has received surprisingly little attention from students of American history”); and the history of economic ideas in America may be similarly described:—it does not yet exist.