ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a concise review of the history of twentieth century economic institutionalism. Institutions as "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior" are necessary for the functioning of society, the predictability of people's behavior and the construction of social sciences, including economics. The notion of institution has been used extensively and was developed in the 20th century. "Habit" is a classical notion that derives from ancient Greek. Walton H. Hamilton coined the expression "institutional economics" and affirmed that "the proper subject matter of economic theory is institutions". The old institutionalist economic current, which flourished around the work of Veblen, John Commons and Wesley Mitchel during the early years of the last century, has been continued by some "institutionalist" economists during the interwar period. In 1967, the Journal of Economic Issues (JEI), sponsored by the recently created Association for Evolutionary Economics, was founded in the United States. The JEI is an outlet for scholarly articles with foundations in old institutional economics.
