Hiram Pendleton Caton III (16 August 1936 – 13 December 2010) was a professor of politics and history at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, until his retirement.
He has published some 175 articles, across six or seven fields—medical ethics and bioethics, human ethology, modern political and economic history, anthropology (with special attention to the Freeman-Mead controversy), philosophy (with emphasis on rationalism and positivism), crowd studies, identity psychology, and problems of the integration of biological/evolutionary factors into the social sciences, especially political science.
Some reviewers stressed that it set forth a new interpretation of what drove the creation of capitalism, partly by tapping little-known historical sources.
It offers interpretations of the French Revolution, of the founding of the United States of America, of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and of the origin of the legend of wicked capitalism.
Caton argues that Smith's conception of economics was pre-industrial (it failed to recognise that industrial technology had become a commodity) and states that the wicked capitalism legend was created in the 1820–1840 period by a clique of factory owners.
[citation needed] He has also devised a new interpretation of Darwin's famous illness, which he presented at the ISHE conference in Detroit, August 2006.