The Evolution of Institutional Economics / Edition 1

by Geoffrey M Hodgson

Overview

This exciting new book from Geoffrey Hodgson is eagerly awaited by social scientists from many different backgrounds. This book charts the rise, fall and renewal of institutional economics in the critical, analytical and readable style that Hodgson's fans have come to know and love, and that a new generation of readers will surely come to appreciate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415322539
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/04/2004
Series:	Economics as Social Theory
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Geoffrey M. Hodgson is Research Professor in Business Studies at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He was formerly a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge, UK. His previous books include How Economics Forgot History (2001) and Economics and Utopia (1999), both available from Routledge.

Table of Contents

	List of illustrations	xiii
	Preface	xiv
	Acknowledgements	xx
	Dramatis personae principes	xxii
Part I	Introduction	1
1	Nature and scope	3
2	Agency and structure	12
3	Objections and explanations	41
Part II	Darwinism and the Victorian social sciences	67
4	Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and the human species	69
5	Precursors of emergence and multiple-level evolution	99
Part III	Veblenian institutionalism	123
6	The beginnings of Veblenian institutionalism	125
7	The Darwinian mind of Thorstein Veblen	143
8	Veblen's evolutionary institutionalism	176
9	The instinct of workmanship and the pecuniary culture	195
10	A wrong turning: science and the machine process	206
11	Missed connections: creative synthesis and emergent evolution	225
12	The launch of institutional economics and the loss of its Veblenian ballast	248
Part IV	Institutionalism into the wilderness	283
13	John R. Commons and the tangled jungle	285
14	Wesley Mitchell and the triumph of macroeconomics	309
15	The maverick institutionalism of Frank Knight	322
16	The evolution of Clarence Ayres	345
17	The Ayresian dichotomies: Ayres versus Veblen	355
18	The decline of institutional economics	379
Part V	Beginning the reconstruction of institutional economics	399
19	The potential revival of Veblenian institutionalism	401
20	On individuals and institutions	419
21	Conclusion and beginning	447
	Bibliography	453
	Index	520