ABSTRACT
When John Commons began the task of providing institutionalism with its first systematic theoretical treatise, the intellectual background had already changed radically, compared with the period before the First World War. By the 1920s, behaviourism was rapidly surpassing instinct psychology (Curti, 1980; Degler, 1991). In philosophy, positivism was rapidly displacing pragmatism. Before logical positivism spread to America in the 1930s, earlier forms of positivism were already well established, and their manifestations were clearly visible in behaviourist psychology. Furthermore, on liberal ideological grounds, there was a strong reaction against so-called ‘social Darwinism’ and the use of biological explanations in the social sciences. Links between the social sciences and biology were axed, and even biological metaphors became suspect (Degler, 1991; Hodgson, 1999b; Ross, 1991). Crucially, even among institutionalists, faith was lost in the Veblenian research programme to place economics within an encompassing Darwinian and evolutionary framework.
