----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]