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This essay charts an intellectual journey. Geoffrey M. Hodgson became an institutional economist in the 1980s. He explains how he discovered institutional economics and what strains of institutional thought were attractive for him. Another issue raised in this essay is how institutional researchers organize and move forward. Hodgson argues for an interdisciplinary approach, but this is not without its problems.

This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

The first Wisconsin Ph.D.s who came to MSU with an institutional bent were agricultural economists and included Henry Larzalere (Ph.D. 1938) whose major professor was Asher Hobson. Larzalere recalls the influence of Commons who retired in 1933. Upon graduation, Larzalere worked a short time for Wisconsin Governor Phillip Fox LaFollette who won passage of the nation’s first unemployment compensation act. Commons had earlier helped LaFollette’s father, Robert, to a number of institutional innovations.⁴ Larzalere continued the Commons’ tradition of contributing to the development of new institutions rather than being content to provide an efficiency apologia for existing private governance structures. He helped Michigan farmers form cooperatives. He taught land economics prior to Barlowe’s arrival in 1948, but primarily taught agricultural marketing. One of his Master’s degree students was Glenn Johnson (see below). Larzalere retired in 1977.

This paper seeks to evaluate how some of the core general principles of heterodox political economy (HPE) can be applied to the issue of how HPE has managed to undergo resurgence and development over recent decades.

Four major principles of heterodoxy are applied successively to this issue: historical specificity; contradiction; heterogeneous agents and groups; and circular and cumulative causation.

These principles assist in comprehending how HPE is able to develop its own concepts, networks, publications, academic departments, teaching and policy‐relevant material.

HPE has had considerable success in developing a conceptual apparatus, which helps to explain the emergence of much of its edifice being developed in academic and policy circles. The performance of HPE has been impressive.

The conceptual apparatus of heterodoxy can be applied to real world situations; specifically a component of world history over especially the past 40 years.

This is the first time such a theme has been explored in the literature.

This article explores what is meant by social economics in a set of ten specific commentaries or interpretations which appear to be widely accepted by social economists. In brief those commentaries are organized and presented in the following manner. Social economics is: heterodox; evolutionary, revolutionary, and counter‐revolutionary; a social science; a moral science; social economics because it addresses the social question; recognizes that the invisible hand does not protect the common good; anthropocentric; teleological; has vision; and has a three‐part structure. This article tends toward simplicity and brevity, the better to set forth the essential nature of social economics. Social economics is more than just a subspecialty area within or a branch of the tree of conventional economic thought. Rather social economics is an entire body of thought, a different way of thinking about economic affairs. It resembles mainstream economics in the same way that one tree resembles another. But it is a separate tree, with its own life force supplied by the scholarly energies of those who identify with social economics.

This chapter discusses conceptual links among Hazel Kyrk’s A Theory of Consumption (1923), the overall work of Thorstein Veblen, and Wesley C. Mitchell’s essays on spending and money. The three authors are concerned with transformations in production, related changes in the organization of consumption, and the effects on people. The approach is based on reading of Kyrk’s book in light of an integrated view of Veblen’s overall work. This chapter explains how Mitchell’s essays on money and spending built on Veblen’s work and discusses their relevance for understanding Kyrk’s book as conceptually linked to institutional economics. This chapter delineates the following commonalities: conception of living humans and money as an institution; distinction between business and industrial concerns; connection between distribution, waste, and consumption; and Veblen’s “machine process” of standardization in production and its relation to consumption. This chapter brings more detail in the conceptual and theoretical discussion of Veblen’s influence on Kyrk’s book.

This study is a comment on Geoffrey Hodgson’s “Discovering Institutionalism: One Person’s Journey.” In this self-description of the evolution of his thought, Hodgson distinctly acknowledges Thorstein Veblen’s influence on his own institutional perspective. This is the issue that I explore in this study. My argument is that Hodgson can be understood as a Veblenian, but he does not fit in the Veblenian notion that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that Hodgson’s notion of habits is the strongest Veblen’s influence on him, and his reconstitutive downward and upward causations are in line with Veblen’s institutionalism, albeit without the mid-twentieth century Veblenian writings. I also address the approach to the content of habits as a break between Hodgson’s and Veblen’s institutionalism. By offering an unprecedented Veblenianism, I argue that Hodgson’s institutional economics can be understood as a new institutionalist segmentation.

Economics and political philosophy tend to lead separate existences in separate university departments. This paper argues that there are gains to be had in the understanding of the teaching of economics if the intellectual divide between these disciplines is bridged. The history of economic thought owes its evolution in part to responses at particular points in time to the enduring questions of political philosophy. A more deep‐seated understanding of economics and of HET is therefore available if considered in conscious alliance with the history of political philosophy (HPP). In short, the argument of this paper ‐ which considers five dimensions of the interdependence of HET and HPP ‐ is the reverse of Scott Gordon’s conclusion that economists have little or nothing to learn from philosophers.