ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of few economists' thinking when they worked with John R. Commons. It summarizes their role on the national stage. The chapter reviews the positions of their critics, and looks at how history has treated the positions of the critics. Commons taught mainly by engaging students in his projects and allowing them to interpret their experiences with him. History offers a test of the conventional wisdom that denies the relevance of unions and, by implication, the Commons gang's assumptions about the US economy. The labor market lens through which Commons's students viewed poverty permitted them to define rights above and beyond the charity given historically to the "undeserving poor." But that same lens closed out people condemned to poverty by other "social facts." In this sense, many critics had a point. For Commons's students, unions, freedom of assembly, and social security all comprised a single never-completed process of searching to remove unfairness from society.
