Preface

Summary

The reason I propose to ‘revisit’ institutional economics is that in the condition of disarray which the discipline of economics finds itself today I feel that institutionalism needs to be reappraised as a school of thought with promises of greater relevance to the task which our profession is called upon to wrestle with today.

The term ‘institutionalism’ has been applied in the past to a doctrinal movement in the United States from about 1890 when Thorstein Veblen began his academic career at Cornell University; and he, along with John Commons and Wesley Mitchell, have been regarded as the main protagonists of this school.

However, orthodox judgment on this movement, as exemplified by the standard textbook of Paul Samuelson, is that ‘40 years ago Institutionalism seemed to wither away as an effective counterforce in economics’. Kenneth E. Boulding, too, who has certainly broadened the vista of our discipline into sociological and even natural-scientific dimensions, had an occasion to describe institutional economics as an ‘interlude nevertheless which ended for all practical purposes in the 1930s’.

I beg to differ in this judgment and I shall try to explain why in the course of my series of lectures on this occasion.

I begin with a quotation from Allan Gruchy who rather recently characterized ‘institutionalists’ as those who ‘inquired into problems such as the impact of technological change on the structure and functioning of the economic system, the power relations among economic interest groups, the logic of the process of industrialization, and the determination of national goals and priorities’.