Edwin R.A. Seligman, 1861-1939.

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, (Whately, Senior, Lloyd) out of obscurity.

This Columbia economist was, together with his more radical comrade-in-methodology, Richard T. Ely, 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 and Austrian economics. Seligman was one of the founders and organizers of the early New School for Social Research.

Major works of Edwin Seligman

• The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation, 1892.
• Progressive Taxation in Theory and Practice, 1894.
• Essays in Taxation, 1895.
• Economic Interpretation of History, 1902.
• Principles of Economics, 1905.
• "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.

Resources on E.R.A. Seligman

• Seligman Page at McMaster
• "Review of Seligman's Essays in Taxation" by F.R. Fairchild, 1913, AER
• "Review of Seligman's Income Tax" by Carl Plehn, 1915, AER
• Another portrait of E.R.A. Seligman