This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the “historical” and the “rational choice” variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. ...

Abstract Silvestri interviews McCloskey about her forthcoming book, ‘Beyond Behaviorism, Positivism, and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics’, critical of recent economics, especially neo-institutionalism. Neo-institutionalism uses the ugly character ‘Herr Max U’ as its central idea: elevation Prudence to only virtue. Institutions are mainly intermediate, not ultimate, causes society. Ethics, rhe...

This paper makes a theoretical contribution to the IMP tradition by revisiting the relationship between institutionalism and the “markets-as-networks” approach. In particular, the diversity of institutional thought is reviewed and different strands of institutional thought identified. It is argued that an engagement with these broader institutional traditions has the potential to contribute to ...

This paper reconstructs the CCC from the writings of Myrdal and Kapp to explore the unique characteristics of this key concept of institutional economics. Moreover, the paper demonstrates the CCC’s application to minimize social costs and its implications for Political Institutionalism. Incorporating new unpublished material from the Kapp Archive, namely the Myrdal-Kapp correspondence and Kapp’...

Social science in general and political science in particular have been resistant to the mobilization of evolutionary and specifically Darwinian ideas for analytic and explanatory purposes. This paper documents a disconnect between political scientists and standard evolutionary theory. Historical institutionalism is identified as a subfield particularly well-suited, but presently ill-equipped, ...

This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of...