Hiroyuki Uni, ed.: Contemporary Meanings of John R. Commons’s Institutional Economics: An Analysis Using a Newly Discovered Manuscript

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Notes

¹ The 1927 manuscript corresponds to only about 267 pages of Institutional Economics, which runs over 900 pages.

² From a microfilm contents list, it appears that the Commons Papers also include chapters 3 and 6, but neither chapter matches the material found by Uni.

³ The 1925 manuscript, titled Reasonable Value, is identical to a copy I found in a library at Cornell University and later shared with others via Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (see Commons 1925).

⁴ See Commons (1934, 380–381) for a discussion of marginalism and scarcity.

⁵ What Commons called judicial transactions in the 1927 manuscript were subsumed into the broader notion of rationing transactions in Institutional Economics.

⁶ For an extension of Common’s analysis of U.S. capitalist development, see Charles J. Whalen (2008).

⁷ Uni argues that “the most remarkable theoretical progress in the 1927 manuscript” involves Common’s discussion of three types of transactions and their interrelations (p. 14). The book also makes it clear that the new institutional economics of Oliver Williamson bears little resemblance to Commons’s institutionalism.

⁸ In 2009, I had access to the USDA’s two volumes and took extensive notes, but my work with the document was put on hold after accepting a new position. Contents of the volumes in the USDA collection, which bear the title Reasonable Value: A Theory of Volitional Economics (Commons 1927) and appear to have been added to the Beltsville library in April 1998, are as follows:

• Volume 1 runs 377 pages. It starts with a table of contents listing ten chapters. The first eight chapters listed are the same as those found in Uni’s 1927 manuscript (1-Method, 2-John Locke, 3-Quesnay, 4-Hume and Peirce, 5-Adam Smith, 6-Bentham and Blackstone, 7-Malthus, and 8-Scarcity and Efficiency), but the USDA manuscript also lists two additional chapters (9-Futurity, and 10-Capital, Credit, and Prices). The USDA manuscript then contains all the pages found by Uni, plus an undated seven-page section inserted at the end of chapter 1 and a 28-page section inserted at the end of chapter 8, dated May 31, 1929.

• Volume 2 runs from page 378 through page 924. It contains chapter 9 (Futurity) and chapter 10 (Capital, Credit and Prices), consistent with the original table of contents, followed by three additional chapters: chapter 11 (Futurity and Property, dated September 1928); chapter 12 (Willingness, from September 1928); and chapter 13 (Reasonableness, which is undated and unfinished). The volume ends with an outline of the rest of the unfinished chapter, and the last line of the final page indicates that a concluding chapter was also planned: chapter 14 (From Locke to Going Concerns).

While composing this review, I persuaded the USDA library to digitize their holding (which does not circulate and did not appear in the WorldCat online catalogue). It can be found at https://tinyurl.com/lvquusp. (Microfilm records also indicate that material in volume 2 of the USDA manuscript can be found in the Commons Papers of the Wisconsin Historical Society.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles J. Whalen

Charles J. Whalen is a visiting scholar at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy of the State University of New York at Buffalo.