ABSTRACT
Thorstein Veblen and John Commons had already set out the approach of institutional economics in the late 1890s (Samuels 1998). Works such as Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class had achieved a mass readership. Commons had already become the foremost authority on American labour organization and had advised the US and Wisconsin state governments. Successive leading institutionalists such as Wesley C.Mitchell and John Maurice Clark had also established prominent academic reputations. But until December 1918 the term “institutional economics’’ had not been widely used to describe their school.
