ABSTRACT
On 11 November 1918, in the Forest of Compiègne in France, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allies, ending hostilities in the First World War. A few days later, in December, across the Atlantic, at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the term ‘institutional economics’ was announced in a paper delivered by Walton Hamilton (1919). Thorstein Veblen and John Commons had already built the foundations of institutional economics in the late 1890s (Samuels, 1998). Works such as Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class had achieved a wide popular readership. Commons had advised the U.S. and Wisconsin state governments and had become the foremost authority on American labour organisation. Successive leading institutionalists such as Wesley C.Mitchell and John Maurice Clark had established prominent academic reputations. But until 1918 the term ‘institutional economics’ had not been used to describe their school.
