Founding of Institutional Economics

Warren J. Samuels is Professor of Economics at Michigan State University, specializing in the history of economic thought, methodology, and law and economics.

• Introduction PART I Veblen and Commons 1 Veblen, Commons, and the Industrial Commission 2 Veblen and Commons and the concept of community PART II Commons, A Sociological View of Sovereignty 3 An evolutionary theory of the development of property and the state 4 Sovereignty and withholding in John Commons’s political economy 5 The identity and significance of Commons’s A Sociological View of Sovereignty 6 Commons, sovereignty, and the legal basis of the economic system 7 John R.Commons’s “Political Economy and Law”: Harbinger of A Sociological View of Sovereignty and Legal Foundations of Capitalism PART III Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class 8 Veblen and the vanishing of the “leisure class” 9 The Theory of the Leisure Class and the theory of demand 10 Veblen’s contribution to the instrumental theory of normative value 11 Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and the genesis of evolutionary economics 12 Veblen’s feminism in historical perspective 13 Veblen and the anthropological perspective 14 The rhetoricality of Thorstein Veblen’s economic theorizing: A critical reading of The Theory of the Leisure Class 15 Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen on fashion fin de siècle 16 A neoinstitutional theory of social change in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class