ABSTRACT
Although Thorstein Veblen never attained a senior academic position, he had a number of influential students and his academic reputation grew steadily. One of his students was Wesley C. Mitchell who became, in the interwar years, one of the most influential economists in America. By the end of the First World War, institutional economics had become an identifiable movement.1
Nevertheless, the treatment of the problem of historical specificity within this movement was patchy at best. Although the influence of the German historical school was acknowledged and discussed (Mitchell, 1969), the problem of historical specificity did not receive so much attention. While in the German historical school it had been a central topic of debate, this was not so within American institutionalism. We are obliged to consider the scattered instances in which the issue surfaced in America.
