Geoffrey Martin Hodgson

Loughborough University London · Institute of International Management

Many social scientists still resist Darwinian insights. A possible reason for this is a fear of being associated with Social Darwinism. This article updates a 2002 search for appearances of Social Darwinism in articles and reviews on the JSTOR database. This database has since increased substantially in size, and it now includes far more publicatio...

A principal argument in this paper is that the claimed discrepancy between (largely static) routines and their potentially varied behavioral outcomes derives principally from questionable definitions of routines based on (patterns of) behavior. Definitions based mainly on behaviors are often defective, partly because they evade the causal processes...

Steve Keen has written an important book that should spark the interest of economists and others interested in pressing economic problems. It contains six chapters. The introductory chapter is entitled ‘Why this manifesto?’ It argues that economics is in a bad state and that a Kuhnian paradigm shift is required to overcome the limitations of the ne...

Guild socialism was developed in the 1906–25 period. It has been held up as a ‘libertarian’ and ‘democratic’ alternative to the statist socialism of the Fabians and the Soviet bloc. This article outlines the basic features of guild socialism, particularly in the most influential version of G. D. H. Cole. Guild socialists wanted to minimise markets...

Extracts from an important article by the American psychologist, philosopher and social scientist Donald T. Campbell are reproduced here, with an introduction underlining the importance of his argument for today. Campbell identified disciplinary boundaries as enablers of specialization but often barriers to scientific innovation and shared knowledg...

With its eighteenth annual volume, the Journal of Institutional Economics (JOIE) has come of age. This editorial report looks at the growth of the journal, summarises some of its achievements, reviews progress in addressing diversity and gender balance, outlines current editorial policy, and considers some further issues that are important for the...

Despite agreement on many points, including our shared insistence that ‘corporation’ and ‘firm’ are different concepts, Jean-Philippe Robé still maintains that they are mutually exclusive: no corporation is a firm, and no firm is a corporation. In contrast, we follow standard nomenclature when we point out that all (business) corporations are firms...

This essay discusses the practical limits to democratic participation in decision-making. While defending representative democracy, it looks at some experiments with deliberative, participatory, or direct democracy which reveal a number of problems. Among these are establishment of incentives for voters to become adequately informed on issues, incl...

This is a review of Joel Mokyr's fascinating book entitled A Culture of Growth. The work is summarized, noting its focus on Darwin-style evolutionary explanations of cultural change. But Mokyr's emphasis on cultural entrepreneurs and positive feedbacks in the procreation of ideas is insufficient to explain the origins of modern economic growth. Too...

This article is a reply to five reviews (by Lynne Chester, David Dequech, John Henry, Marc Lavoie, and Jason Potts) of Is there a Future for Heterodox Economics? (by Geoffrey Hodgson). It welcomes the debate that has emerged on the nature and future of heterodox economics. The article revisits the problem of defining heterodox (and orthodox) econom...

This conversation between Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Paolo Silvestri touches on the main themes of Hodgson's 2021 book on Liberal Solidarity. In the book Hodgson uses insights from institutional and evolutionary economics. Here he explains the differences between solidaristic liberalism and the ideas of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises,...

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the g...

This scoping paper addresses the role of financial institutions in empowering the British Industrial Revolution. Prominent economic historians have argued that investment was largely funded out of savings or profits, or by borrowing from family or friends: hence financial institutions played a minor role. But this claim sits uneasily with later evi...

With its multiple meanings and conflicting connotations, the term “evolution” has been associated with controversy for over two centuries. Much of this dispute has concerned the relationship between the social sciences and biology. While in the nineteenth century this relationship was close, there was a dramatic parting of the ways in the twentieth...

This is a review essay of Markets without Limits by Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski and of The Invisible Hand? by Bas van Bavel. From different perspectives, both books focus on the moral or practical limits to markets in modern society. While both works make major contributions, there are theoretical flaws. Brennan and Jarworski powerfully cou...

The interview addresses some of the main threads that run through Geoff Hodgson’s work. These include the problems with the neoclassical utility maximization framework, the necessity to include moral motivations in a theory of human behaviour, and the requirement that such a theory be consistent with evidence from evolutionary biology. These requir...

This Element examines the historical emergence of evolutionary economics, its development into a strong research theme after 1980, and how it has hosted a diverse set of approaches. Its focus on complexity, economic dynamics and bounded rationality is underlined. Its core ideas are compared with those of mainstream economics. But while evolutionary...

This is a response to the criticism by Rod O'Donnell of the account of Keynes’ notion of a general theory in the book How Economics Forgot History (Hodgson, 2001). Several points of full agreement are noted, including the fact that Keynes’ work contains much discussion of historically specific institutions, including the financial and market instit...

Market universalism refers to the non-metaphorical tendency to use the term market to describe a wide variety of arrangements or processes in the real world. Using institutional criteria, this paper establishes some minimal necessary features of a market, to show that some particular arrangements are not markets. For example, while mechanisms of co...

Dirijo estas cartas dos amigos imaginarios. En la primera, a un libertario de libre mercado, reconozco las fortalezas de su posición, pero argumento que la posición libertaria básica se debe actualizar a la luz de los desarrollos del mundo financiero y corporativo, y de la creciente desigualdad en la distribución de la riqueza. Dirijo la segunda ca...

In a seminal 1989 article, Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that by making the monarch more answerable to Parliament, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to secure property rights in England and stimulate the rise of capitalism. Similarly, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson later wrote that in the English Middle Ages there...

Definitions are crucial for institutional analysis. This article explains the nature of taxonomic definitions, with particular attention to their use in economics and other social sciences. Taxonomic definitions demarcate one species of entity from another. They are vital for the communication of meaning between scientists, who must share some basi...

This chapter is an attack on normative cultural relativism, described as ‘cultural relativism’ for short. Cultural relativists argue that we (especially those of us from the West) should not criticize the moral values of other cultures. Its proponents allege that such criticism furthers Western globalization or imperialism by imposing Western value...

This chapter concentrates on European ideas in the period from 1381 to 1789, noting that many early revolts appealed to religion for justification. Some called for communal ownership, but typically on a small scale. Contrary to a widespread misinterpretation, the English Levellers of the 1640s defended private property. They saw the legitimacy of g...

This chapter concludes the book by outlining a policy agenda for a New Old Left. There are foremost emphases on the problem of inequality and on the survival of democracy in a complex world. Possible measures to deal with inequality include the enhancement of educational provision, a guaranteed basic income, and a politically viable mechanism for a...

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild’s life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These...

Discussion of the nature and role of institutions is now ubiquitous in the social sciences. Institutions are widely accepted as important in helping to explain numerous social and economic outcomes. This entry discusses ways of defining institutions and how they relate to human behavior. The definition and analysis of institutions are different tas...

In a seminal 1989 article, Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that by making the monarch more answerable to Parliament, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to secure property rights in England and stimulate the rise of capitalism. Similarly, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson later wrote that in the English Middle Ages there...

Friedrich Hayek and Kinji Imanishi were moving in different directions in their treatment of Darwinism. In this chapter, Geoffrey Hodgson focuses on Hayek’s treatment of the Darwinian selection concept, his embrace of group selection, his stress on self-organization and his claim that social evolution is ‘Lamarckian.’ Hodgson concludes that there w...

This article considers the causal connection between adaptability and survival in populations of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Some literatures have downplayed adaptability by focusing on statics and equilibria (parts of mainstream economics). Others have argued that it is very difficult to make individual firms more adaptable, and the focus...

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild's life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These...

"Development policy is a lively and controversial area of academic discourse. It is too often assumed that policies and institutions that prevail in the West will be automatically and universally suited for developing countries. But as Ha-Joon Chang (2002b) and others have pointed out, the successfully developed countries did not themselves follow...

The literature on the determinants of cross-country variation in financial system development identifies historical institutional factors, mostly rooted in colonial effects, as key causes. Using a sample of 39 African former European colonies for 2006–11, this paper investigates the extent to which the historical institutional determinants identifi...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

This introduction considers the highly influential contribution of Douglass C. North to economic history and institutional economics, as it developed from the 1960s until his death in 2015. It sketches the evolution of his arguments concerning the roles of institutions, organizations and human agency. North's conception of the economic actor became...

In a seminal 1989 article, Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that by making the monarch more answerable to Parliament, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to secure property rights in England and stimulate the rise of capitalism. Similarly, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson later wrote that in the English Middle Ages there...

The modern wave of ‘evolutionary economics’ was launched in 1982 with the classic study by Nelson and Winter. This paper reports a broad bibliometric analysis of ‘evolutionary’ research in the disciplines of management, business, economics, and sociology over 25 years from 1986 to 2010. It confirms that Nelson and Winter's book (An evolutionary the...

Neal Larry and Williamson Jeffrey G. , eds. The Cambridge History of Capitalism. Volume I: The Rise of Capitalism from Ancient Origins to 1848; and Volume II: The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xii + 616 pp. (Vol. I), x + 567 pp. (Vol. II). ISBN 9781107019638 (Vol. I), 97811...

The Review of Social Economy was founded to highlight the irreducible social aspects of economic activity. Yet, the nature of the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ are both unresolved, and they are much more problematic than often assumed. This article probes Karl Polanyi’s depiction of the relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ and subsequ...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

Mainstream Growth Economists and Capital Theorists: A Survey. ByMarin Muzhani. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. x + 558 pp. Bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $44.95. ISBN: cloth, 978-0-7735-4365-2; paper, 978-0-7735-4366-9. - Volume 90 Issue 1 - Geoffrey M. Hodgson

One of the most important debates in the history of economics is known as the ‘socialist calculation debate.’ It was initiated in 1920 by the Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises and continued by Friedrich Hayek, who forcibly criticised the schemes for socialist planning developed by Oskar Lange, Henry Dickenson and others. But the earlier cr...

The literature on varieties of capitalism has stimulated some authors to challenge notions of ‘essentialism’ and even the concept of capitalism itself. This essay argues that the existence of varieties of capitalism does not rule out the need for, or possibility of, specification or definition of that type. Accordingly, ‘capitalism’ is still a viab...

The institutional nature of work has changed dramatically over the last three hundred years, and there is no reason to assume that change will cease in the twenty-first century. This article criticizes the theoretical basis for some previous confident predictions, including deskilling (Karl Marx), and massive reductions in the extent of the working...

The use of the phrase ?social Darwinism? in leading anglophone academic journals was rare before the 1940s and generally restricted to critics, who applied it to racist, individualist, or imperialist ideologies that they disapproved. No ideological movement described its own doctrine as ?social Darwinism.? Because of their antimilitarism, Herbert S...

This essay summarizes key parts of the book Conceptualizing Capitalism. It briefly explains why institutions must be central to a definition of capitalism, and what is the nature and role of such a definition. It dates the rise of capitalism in England to the development of financial institutions in the eighteenth century, particularly concerning t...

Originally “capital” referred to head-counts of cattle, as measures of wealth. But in thirteenth-century Italy it acquired its enduring commercial meaning as money, or the money-value of assets invested in enterprise. In contrast, Adam Smith treated physical assets, machines and people as “capital” and this different usage has dominated economics s...

Chapter 2 outlines some basic and more general concepts and issues that are necessary before dealing with the more specific social formation of capitalism. A social structure is defined as a set of social relations between interacting individuals in a society. Social positions are designated social roles within social structures. Institutions are s...

This chapter starts by tracing the origin of the word “capitalism” to works by Louis Blanc in the 1840s. The commonplace meanings of the term are considered, noting a prevalent focus on markets and private property. But these two features are much older than the dynamic economic system that emerged in the eighteenth century. Further criteria need t...

This chapter considers the nature of the firm and the corporation. A firm is defined as a legal unit, set up to produce goods or services for sale. A corporation is a special type of firm, involving legal incorporation and registration. The accounts of the firm in the transaction cost economics of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson are outlined. Bo...

Chapter 3 clarifies the nature of law, criticizing the idea that it can emerge spontaneously through the interactions of individuals, and rejecting the notion (promoted by Friedrich Hayek among several others) that law is essentially custom. Instead it is argued that the development of law required a state and an institutionalized judiciary. Althou...

Herbert Gintis and Dirk Helbing have developed a highly impressive, over-arching theoretical framework, using rational choice theory, general equilibrium theory, and game theory. They extend this to cover “moral, social and other-regarding values,†plus social norms, culture, and institutions. While accepting the value of their contribution, I a...

This is a response to the useful comments by Allen, Barzel and Cole on Hodgson (2015a) on property rights. One section deals with some misrepresentations by Allen and Barzel. For instance, contrary to one interpretation, Hodgson (2015a) did not accuse the ‘economics of property rights’ of ignoring legal institutions or of making them generally irre...

This is an introduction to the twelve essays in the special memorial issue in honor of Ronald Coase. It includes a brief account of Coase's long life and some of its many achievements. Coase's distinctive, worldly and empirically-grounded approach to economics is highlighted, claiming that it has yielded major theoretical and policy insights. This...

Legal theorists and other commentators have long established a distinction between property and possession. According to this usage adopted here, possession refers to control of a resource, but property involves legally sanctioned rights. Strikingly, prominent foundational accounts of the ‘economics of property rights’ concentrate on possession, do...

In their stimulating paper, Hindriks and Guala (2014) bridge the prominent alternative conceptions of institutions-as-rules and institutions-as-equilibria, by proposing a ‘rules in equilibrium’ interpretation. This comment argues that the task of defining institutions as a class of phenomena is different from the tasks of understanding or analysing...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

This special issue of the Journal of Institutional Economics on the future of institutional and evolutionary economics consists of this introduction, four full essays, and two sizeable comments. Menard and Shirley (2014) and Menard (2014) discuss the future of the new institutional economics, and their two essays are followed by a reflection by Hod...

These reflections are prompted by the papers by Ménard (2014) and Ménard and Shirley (2014). Their essays centre on the path-breaking contributions to the ‘new institutional economics’ (NIE) by Ronald Coase, Douglass North and Oliver Williamson. In response, while recognising their substantial achievements, it is pointed out that these three thinke...

This article traces the historical usages of the term capital and the explosion of different types of supposed ‘capital’ in the twentieth century, including ‘human capital’ and ‘social capital’. In medieval and early modern times, capital meant money investable or invested in business. This meaning persists in business circles today. In contrast, A...

Experienced economics editors discuss navigating the world of scholarly journals, with details on submission, reviews, acceptance, rejection, and editorial policy. Editors of academic journals are often the top scholars in their fields. They are charged with managing the flow of hundreds of manuscripts each year—from submission to review to rejecti...

This introduction considers the overall character and impact of the work of Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012). Her work is not only inter-disciplinary in character; it also bridges ‘original’ and ‘new’ traditions within institutional economics. Her studies of the governance of common-pool resources inspired multiple lines of enquiry in economics and other...

Marshall was the great synthesiser of neoclassical economics. Yet with his qualified assumption of self-interest, his emphasis on variation in economic evolution and his cautious attitude to the use of mathematics, Marshall differs fundamentally from other leading neoclassical contemporaries. Metaphors inspire more specific analogies and ontologica...

China has enjoyed spectacular economic growth since the 1980s. Economic models based on production functions typically suggest that China's rapid growth will continue at similarly high rates, but they ignore pressing structural and institutional constraints on its development. Among the problems identified in this paper, we point to an impending de...

Markus Scholz and Thomas A. C. Reydon discuss the approach known as generalized Darwinism and make a number of comments and criticisms. This reply demonstrates that a number of their statements are inaccurate and misleading. It is important to examine the accounts of generalized Darwinism carefully, including what its proponents say about its expla...

The terms ‘evolution’ and ‘coevolution’ are widely used in organization studies but rarely defined. Often it is unclear whether they refer to single entities or populations. When specific evolutionary processes are suggested, the labelling is often misleading. For example, in the debate over the roles of individual adaptation and competitive select...

Antony (Tony) M. Honoré was born in London in 1921 but was brought up in South Africa. He served in the British Army during the Second World War and was severely wounded in the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. After the war, he continued his studies at New College, Oxford, and he has lived and taught in Oxford for well over half a century, holding fel...

This essay is in two parts. The first considers the evolution of evolutionary economics from 1982 to 2012. While enormous advances are acknowledged, it is argued that the field is in danger of fragmentation and that there has been relatively little development in its over-arching theoretical framework since Nelson and Winter (1982). This sets the s...

This is a comment on ’Towards a legal theory of finance’ by Katharina Pistor. It notes that both law and money are complex and controversial phenomena. They have to be treated as historically specific institutions that arise in the context of fundamental uncertainty. The historical origins of both are briefly considered. It is argued that fundament...

1871 saw the publication of two major treatises in economics, with self-seeking economic man at their center. In the same year Darwin published The Descent of Man, which emphasized sympathy and cooperation as well as self-interest, and contained a powerful argument that morality has evolved in humans by natural selection. Essentially this stance is...

Despite growing interest in evolutionary economics since the 1980s, a unified theoretical approach has so far been lacking. Methodological and ontological discussions within evolutionary economics have attempted to understand and help rectify this failure, but have revealed in turn further differences of perspective. One aim of this article is to s...