The Dynamic Notion of Competition Pervaded the Bulk of Economics up to the 1920s

In his doctoral dissertation, Frank Machovec documented the thesis that the dynamic notion of competition pervaded the bulk of economics in the neoclassical period up until the 1920s. It was only during the twenties and thirties that equilibrium thinking, and thus the static model of perfect competition, assumed its current dominance in mainstream economic thought. It was presumably this prevalence of the dynamic notion of competition which led Mises into believing, as late as 1932, that the various schools of twentieth-century economic thought shared a common basic understanding of the workings of the market economy.

--Israel M. Kirzner, The Driving Force of the Market: Essays in Austrian Economics, Foundations of the Market Economy (London: Routledge, 2003), 235.