Chapter 17: The Institutional Economics of Geoffrey Hodgson: Some Distinctive Foundations

Geoff Hodgson is arguably the foremost economist working on institutions from a perspective that offers an alternative to contemporary mainstream economics.¹ No one has contributed more than Hodgson to the revitalization of the original institutional economics, in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen and others, but his contributions extend much beyond this. Hodgson’s oeuvre, which is an ongoing process, has not only an excellent quality, but also an impressive breadth, depth, and erudition. Its sheer volume is astounding.

Institutions are socially shared (systems of) rules of behavior or thought. Some 10 years ago, I started describing my own research on institutions as divided into two interrelated sets of issues: (1) the relations between institutions, on the one hand, and the behavior and the thought of economic agents, on the other; and (2) the ubiquity and importance of institutions in the economy. These are very broad sets, and much of the work of any author on institutions deals with a topic that could be classified into one of them (especially the second²). This applies to Hodgson’s writings as well, but in his case, one can additionally identify other sets of topics in which several of his writings fit (in no particular order): (3) evolution, Darwinism, and economics; (4) institutions and the generality of economic theory; (5) the history of economic thought on institutions; (6); the methodology of economics; (7) economics as an academic discipline and the future of heterodox economics; (8) the concept of capitalism; and (9) socialism and social-democratic liberalism.