ABSTRACT
With the Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924), John R.Commons established himself as one of the leading members of the group of American economists who called themselves institutionalists and whose more prominent figures, apart from Commons himself, included foremost Thorstein Veblen and William C. Mitchell.1 What united these authors was their critical distance from the predominantly neo-classical school of thought in economics, whose deficiencies they saw, in particular, in an inadequate behavioral model and in the disregard of the role of institutions in economic life. Apart from this uniting skepticism toward orthodox economics, the American institutionalists shared only limited common ground in their ideas about a theoretical alternative program. Their failure to propose a paradigmatic alternative is, therefore, often considered to be the main reason why their influence within the field has remained rather marginal.
