Arthur Benedict Wolfe was a contributor to Tugwell's volume The Trend of
Economics in 1924, with an essay on "Functional Economics." I believe this
essay was first delivered as a presentation at an AEA meeting in the early
1920s (the Tugwell volume stemmed from some early AEA meeting
presentations), but I'm not sure.

Frank Knight's papers at Chicago hold a copy of the outline of a talk or
essay by Wolfe entitled "The Democratic Principle as Criterion for
Ethico-Economic Valuation." I do not know if it was ever published.

Knight's essay "The Limitations of Scientific Method in Economics" (his
contribution to the Tugwell volume) was in part a response to Wolfe.

Wolfe's use of the term "functional" is interesting. I have not gone back
and looked at this, but it would either place him in the Durkheimian
tradition, or as a collaborator with Leon C. Marshall from University of
Chicago. Knight adopted the term as well in The Economic Organization (the
source of the famous 3, 4 or 5 "functions" of an economic system), but in a
different fashion than Marshall and Wolfe.

Ross Emmett