Institutional Economics

Institutional Economics is the representative work of John Rogers Commons (1862–1945), an American economist and a leading figure of the old institutionalist school. The original English title is Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy, published by Macmillan of New York in 1934. The Chinese translation, based on that edition, was made by Yu Shusheng and published by the Commercial Press in 1962 in the "Chinese Translation of World Academic Classics" series, in two volumes. The book has eleven chapters. Commons understands "institution" as "collective action controlling, liberating, and expanding individual action," argues for combining economics, law, and ethics in the study of economic life, and establishes "transaction" rather than "commodity exchange" as the basic unit of analysis in institutional economics. He divides transactions into three types—bargaining transactions, managerial transactions, and rationing transactions—to explain markets, internal hierarchical relations within firms, and government relations with individuals such as taxation and regulation, thereby bringing seemingly unrelated activities into a single analytical framework. Methodologically, the book starts from the ideas of Locke, Quesnay, Hume, Peirce, Adam Smith, Bentham and Blackstone, Malthus, and others, tracing the origin and evolution of each "idea" one by one, then moves to the author's own propositions such as "efficiency and scarcity," "futurity," and "reasonable value"; the latter half discusses debt and credit institutions, the margin of profit, sovereignty, collective action, and a comparison of communism, fascism, and capitalism. The book is wide-ranging in reference, distinctive in structure, and dense in terminology, and is one of the intellectual sources for understanding twentieth-century institutionalist economics and the "Wisconsin school." This detail page follows the standard edition of the Commercial Press's "Chinese Translation of World Academic Classics" series.