Table of Contents

Part 1: Introduction; 1. Nature and Scope; 2. Agency and Structure; 3. Objections and Explorations; Part 2: Charles Darwin and the Historian of Social Sciences; 4. Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and the Human Species; 5. Precursors of Emergence and Multiple Level Selection Theory; Part 3: Veblenian Institutionalism; 6. The Beginnings of Veblenian Institutionalism; 7. Thorstein Veblen and Post-Darwinian Social Science; 8. Veblen's Evolutionary Institutionalism; 9. The Instinct of Workmanship and the Pecuniary Culture; 10. A Wrong Turn: Science and the Machine Process; 11. Missed Connections: Creative Synthesis and Emergent Evolution; 12. The Launch of Institutional Economics and the Loss of its Veblenian Ballast; Part 4: Four Institutionalist Journeys; 13. John R. Commons and the Tangled Jungle; 14. Wesley Mitchell and the Rebirth of Macroeconomics; 15. Frank Knight as an Institutionalist Economist; 16. The Evolution of Clarence Ayres; 17. The Ayresian Dichotomies: Veblen Versus Ayres; 18. The Decline of Institutional Economics; Part 5: Reconstructing Institutional Economics; 19. The Potential Revival of Veblenian Institutionalism; 20. Elements of a Research Agenda for Institutional Economic Theory

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.

Reviews

"Reconstructs the history of institutional economics in a quest for insights into theoretical problems of agency, structure, emergence, and social evolution."
-"Journal of Economic Literature, 12/2004