EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Was Frank Knight an Institutionalist?

Pier Asso () and Luca Fiorito

Review of Political Economy, 2008, vol. 20, issue 1, 59-77

Abstract: This paper critically examines Geoffrey Hodgson's provocative claim that Frank Knight was a member of the American institutionalist school in the interwar years. In the first section of the paper we provide a definition of institutionalism and emphasize its meaning from a historiographic point of view. The second and third sections analyse the two main methodological struggles between Knight and the institutionalists, namely, the debate during the early 1920s over the use of instinct theory as an explanation of economic behaviour, and the subsequent campaign led by Knight in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the behaviourist wing of American institutionalism a la Copeland and Ayres. The fourth section deals with Knight's own brand of institutionalism. Our main conclusions are that, even if Knight's approach to the study of economic behaviour shows significant affinities with American institutionalism, he was not—both sociologically and in terms of his philosophical premises—an institutionalist.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09538250701661822 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:20:y:2008:i:1:p:59-77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20

DOI: 10.1080/09538250701661822

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon

More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:20:y:2008:i:1:p:59-77