Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy

362 Pages·2.801 MB·English

by  John R. Common

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INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
V T
OLUME WO
2
INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
Its Place in Political Economy
V T
OLUME WO
John R. Commons
with a New Introduction by Malcohn Rutherford
3
Originally published in 1934 by the Macmillan
Company
Published 1990 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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14
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New material this edition copyright © 1990 by
Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
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Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 89-32259
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Commons, John Rogers, 1862-1945.
Institutional economics : its place in
political economy / John R.
Commons; with a new introduction by Malcolm
Rutherford,
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: New York:
Macmillan, 1934.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-88738-831-0
1.Institutional economics. I. Title.
HB99.5.C65 1986
330—dc20
89-32259
CIP
ISBN: 0-88738-797-7 (v. 1)
ISBN: 0-88738-831-0 (v. 2)
ISBN: 0-88738-832-9 (2 vol. set)
ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-831-6 (pbk)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
V T
OLUME WO
INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
PREFACE
X. REASONABLE VALUE
(I) VEBLEN
1. From Corporeal to Intangible Property
2. From Accrual of Wealth to Accrual of Ideas
3. From Managerial Transactions to Bargaining
Transactions
4. Flow of Time and Lapse of Time
(II) FROM INDIVIDUALS TO INSTITUTIONS
(III) FROM NATURAL RIGHTS TO REASONABLE VALUE
(IV) SOVEREIGNTY
1. Executive Sovereignty
2. Legislative Sovereignty
3. Judicial Sovereignty
4. Analytical and Functional Law and Economics
(I) Force
(2) Scarcity
(V) HABITUAL ASSUMPTIONS
(VI) IDEAL TYPES
1. The Pedagogic Ideal Type
2. The Propagandist Ideal Type
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3. The Scientific Ideal Type
4. The Ethical Ideal Type
(VII) Collective Action
I. Politics
(I) Personality, Principles, Organization
(2) Jurisdiction
(3) Rationing
a. The Process
b. The Economic Consequences
c. Justification
2. Merchant Capitalism, Employer Capitalism, Banker
Capitalism—the Industrial Stages
3. Scarcity, Abundance, Stabilization—the Economic
Stages
(I) Competition
(2) Discrimination
4 Prices
5 The Police Power of Taxation
(I) Private Utility and Social Utility
(2) Sites, Costs, Expectations
(3) Canons of Taxation
(4) Statics and Cycles
6 Accidents and Unemployment—Insurance and
Prevention
7 Personality and Collective Action
XI COMMUNISM, FASCISM, CAPITALISM
INDEX
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CHARTS
1. Wholesale Prices in United States and England, 1790-1932
2. Psychological Parallelism (Smith, Ricardo)
3. Functional Psychology (Pleasure)
4. Functional Psychology (Pleasure, Pain)
5. Marx’s Formula of Value
6. The Debt Market, Credits and Debits, June, 1929
7. The Debt Pyramid, June 29, 1929
8. Volume of Gross Sales and Total Receipts
9. The Operating Margin
10. Depreciation
11. The Profit or Loss Margin
12. The Taxable Margin
13. The Financial Margin
14. Wholesale Prices in the United States, 19I9-1933
15. The Profit Cushion
16. Capital Yield, Open Market Rate, and Rediscount Rate, 1919-
1933
TABLES
I. Manufacturing Corporations, Amount of the Specified Items
II. Manufacturing Corporations, Ratios of the Specified Items
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INTRODUCTION TO THE
TRANSACTION EDITION
This reissue of J. R. Commons’ major work, Institutional
Economics: Its Place in Political Economy, is particularly timely as
interest in Commons’ work has never been greater. At least fifteen
substantial articles dealing exclusively or largely with Commons’
ideas have been published in the last six years alone, and many
more are either forthcoming or currently in preparation.1 In
contrast, the secondary literature on Commons prior to this was
both relatively sparse and episodic in character. Even as recently
as the period between 1970 and 1980, when the secondary
literature began to grow, a single special issue of the Journal of
Economic Issues accounted for almost half of the significant
output.2 It is also noticeable that whereas virtually all of the
secondary literature used to be produced by institutionalists for
institutionalists, the more recent work on Commons includes
papers written by noninstitutionalists and directed at
noninstitutionalist audiences (see particularly Endres 1985; M.
Perlman 1986; and Vanberg 1988).
This growing and broadening interest in Commons is
undoubtedly due to the general revival of concern with the role of
institutions in economics, and, more particularly, to the rapid
growth in the attention being given to issues such as the
importance of property rights, the behavior of courts and the
evolution of common law, the behavior of legislatures and the
determination of statute law, the evolution of organizational forms,
and the use of the transaction as a basic unit of analysis. All these
issues were among Commons’ central concerns but did not figure
largely in the work of the other leading early institutionalists.
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