L'Economie institutionnelle

It is no easy thing to tackle the thought of any "sacred monster" in academia, especially when it is elaborate and inaccessible outside of its original language.Yet, such is the challenge taken up by two renowned French-speaking institutionalists, Jean-Jacques Gislain and Bruno Thret, who have published a French translation of John Rogers Commons's Institutional Economics, both his "magnus opus" (1597) and one that was not well received at the time of its publication in 1934.This substantial work amounting to two volumes-representing sixteen years of translation in which around thirty researchers took part-is divided into three main sections: a long introduction detailing the project, a section situating the book in Commons's biographical trajectory, and a comparative section on the relationship of Commons's thought to that of Karl Polanyi and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.There is no doubt that the book's solid structure enables Gislain and Thret to make an essential contribution to the literature on the thought of John Rodgers Commons.Through an analysis of Commons's thought, the book also offers new insights on the "Old Institutionalism" within economics, of which Commons is a key representative.From the introduction onward, Gislain and Thret go to great lengths unraveling the essential concepts of Commons's theory, thereby making Institutional Economics accessible to a French-speaking public.The following three points underscore the extent to which this endeavor by Gislain and Thret constitutes a major contribution for French-speaking readers.(1) Commons's Old Institutionalism is primarily a theory of transactional analysis, the basic unit of economic relations for Commons.For him, to follow this approach leads to a radical shift of perspective, as economic analysis no longer focuses on the relationships between individuals and "things" but on the social relationships between individuals themselves.In Commons's framework, the issue of trade supersedes that of transaction, as that of equilibrium supersedes that of transactional processes

Place making · Economic Theory and Institutions · Political Economy and Marxism · Social Sciences and Governance

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