The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947

Malcolm Rutherford is Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and the leading authority on the history of American institutional economics. He has published widely on this topic in History of Political Economy, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Labor History. He is the author of Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism, published by Cambridge University Press (1994). Professor Rutherford has served as President of the History of Economics Society and the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

• Part I. Introduction: 1. Institutionalism in the history of economics; 2. Understanding institutional economics; Part II. Institutionalist Careers: 3. Walton Hamilton: institutionalism and the public control of business; 4. Morris Copeland: institutionalism and statistics; Part III. Centers of Institutional Economics: 5. Institutionalism at Chicago and beyond; 6. Amherst and the Brookings Graduate School; 7. Wisconsin institutionalism; 8. Institutionalism at Columbia University; 9. The NBER and the foundations; Part IV. Challenges and Changes: 10. The institutionalist reaction to Keynesian economics; 11. Neoclassical challenges and institutionalist responses; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Institutionalism in retrospect.

'This book establishes, more thoroughly than any previous study, the breadth and importance of the interwar institutionalist movement in the United States. It is likely to become the standard work on an episode that is central to the history of American economics in the twentieth century.' Roger E. Backhouse, University of Birmingham