SIf you have never heard of John Rogers Commons (1862-1945), that’s normal: his major work, Institutional Economics. Its Place in Political Economy (Macmillan, 1934), weighing more than 900 pages, has only just been published in French by Classiques Garnier under the title Institutional Economicsin a translation supplemented by an introduction to the current affairs of this work, a biography of this forgotten American economist who was also a political actor in the New Deal – he set up social insurance on behalf of the Roosevelt administration (Social Security Act, 1935) and social laws (Wagner Act, 1935) – and by a comparative study between his work and those of Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) and Proudhon (1809-1865)… Two thousand and twenty pages in total, sixteen years of work by an essentially Franco-Quebec team led by Jean-Jacques Gislain (Laval University, Quebec) and Bruno Théret (Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences-Paris-Dauphine University-PSL/CNRS).
Because John Commons is, with Adam Smith (1723-1790) for the classical economists, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) for the liberals and Karl Marx (1818-1883) for the Marxists, one of the rare thinkers who produced, before Keynes (1883-1946), a complete theory of the functioning of society by crossing numerous disciplines: law, ethics, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, political science.
He is, with Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948), one of the founders of institutionalism (an approach to economics where, to put it very briefly, society plays a more important than market forces alone), but in its “pragmatist” variant, an American philosophical school heir to John Dewey (1859-1952) and Charles Peirce (1839-1914) at the end of the 19th centurye century.
Concept of “futurity”
Some of John Commons’ writings were known to specialists in industrial economics, because he was one of the first to take an interest in labor relations. From this ground and an approach to the foundations of law, Commons proposes a vision of the capitalist economy in which it would not be material goods, merchandise or services that would be exchanged, but property rights. Economic agents contract, through these exchanges, debts which obey not the rules of the market, as envisaged by classical economics, but legal and ethical rules constantly transformed by confrontation with reality and history. , in an “adaptive” approach coming from Darwinism.
You have 39.25% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.