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The New Institutionalism has been a different thing in the hands of 
different practitioners. I comment only on what seems to me to be the main 
thrust of this branch of economics. 
 
Neoclassical Economics, for all its undoubted usefulness, elaborated 
concepts rooted in Marshall's market, short, and long runs. It did not 
consider technological or institutional change. Those matters, in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were left to economic historians. 
When even the economic historians, or the more celebrated of them, also 
ceased to consider these matters, shortly after the "Depression and the 
War", the New Institutionalists took up consideration of institutional 
formation. Not institutional change. Institutional formation. They applied 
the concepts of Neoclassical Economics to an analysis of the formation of 
"efficient institutions". One might question the logical coherence of doing 
so, but, if one stretches the meaning of those concepts to the limit, its 
just possible to see that New Institutionalism filled a gap left by 
Neoclassical Economics and the economic historians. Really a considerable 
contribution to the discipline. 
 
If I may add, both Economic History, and Neoclassical Economics have lost 
the sense that they had, even up to 1960. [Dating is always questionable.]  
Both have turned to expression in mathematics, with a view to building a 
"positive science". This turning has flushed the history of the West, and 
the sense of building a particular kind of society, from what is now 
"Economics". With this "cultural content" removed, foreign students, 
familiar with the universal language of mathematics and quantitative 
measurement, feel quite at home in the 
discipline. North American students interested in Western history and 
institutional development have turned to History and Political Science. 
 
Am I mistaken in this.  Have History and Political Science also changed 
their focus? 
 
Robin Neill 
 
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