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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.

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 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.

Evaluates the significance of Clarence Edwin Ayres′ contribution to the historical development of the institutionalist school of economic thought. Summarizes Ayres′ philosophy of pragmatic instrumentalism and integrates it into his theory of economic progress, which is disaggregated into its component parts: his theory of normative value; his theory of economic causation; and his theory of economic policy. Thoroughly explicates and carefully evaluates each of these theories. Concludes that Clarence Ayres has made an important contribution to the history of institutionalism by synthesizing the pragmatic philosophy of C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey with the institutional economics of Thorstein B. Veblen, John R. Commons, and Wesley C. Mitchell.

The Department of Economics at the University of Oklahoma (Norman) began its Doctoral program in Economics under the Chairmanship of Jim E. Reese [Brinker, 4]. The Department graduated its first Doctoral student in 1951, a student who had received his Masters Degree of Science in Chemical Engineering, 1948. From 1951 to 1995, the Department has granted approximately 101 Doctoral degrees in Economics according to records. Its graduates teach in 62 Universities, foreign and domestic; work for or have worked for the Federal Reserve Bank; The Comptroller of the Treasury of the United States; The Council of Economic Advisors to the President; and The International Monetary Fund. Included are one sitting Congressman and one 1996 Vice Presidential candidate, as well as persons employed in private practice, business, or consulting. There have been 12 women granted the Doctoral Degree which places the Department above the national average.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

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.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).