Introduction

In 1899 Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class and in 1899-1900 John R. Commons published in The American Journal of Sociology the series A Sociological View of Sovereignty (subsequently edited by Joseph Dorfman and published as a book in 1965 by Augustus Kelley). This volume commemorates the centenary of these publications. It particularly commemorates them as founding, or at least foreshadowing, the school of thought which eventually became known as Institutional Economics. Although both writers, perhaps especially Commons, were intellectually ambitious, it is probably the case that neither of them intended or expected to found such a school. ¹