John Rogers Commons

Course and career

Born in 1862 in Ohio, J.R. Commons is regarded as one of the founders of the running American institutionnalist, with Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Clark Mitchell. The course followed by Commons is rather atypical. Having made its studies with the University Johns-Hopkins, and following in particular the courses of Richard T. Ely, Commons does not manage to finish its doctorate. From 1883 to 1904, Commons carries out very many participations in various commissions, carries out expertises, carries out arbitrations and takes part in the drafting of a certain number of legal texts. It is only in 1904, at the 42 years age, that Commons reaches a stable station with the Université of Wisconsin. Until the beginning of the year 1920, its investigations are primarily of an empirical nature and relate primarily to what one then called the " problems of the travail". It takes part thus in American Association for Labor Legislation and its contribution of expert culminates with the édiction, in 1932, of a legislation on the compensation for unemployment, the Wisconsin Unemployment Act . The career of Commons as a theorist begins truly only in 1924 with the publication from its work Legal Foundations off Capitalism in which it recalls the institutional evolution having led to the appearance of the capitalist system. It gives an special attention to the statute and the importance of the private property. Will follow two other works in 1934 ( Institutional Economics ) and in 1950 (on a purely posthumous basis, The Economics off Collective Action ) in which Commons will synthesize the essence of its experiment to make of it a theoretical systematization and an analytical framework with whole share.

Institutional saving in J.R. Commons

The theoretical contribution of Commons still today is very largely ignored. For a share, that is due to the fact that Commons, through the career of its students, was primarily regarded as an expert. But this weak recognition comes more largely from the difficulty of its writings, as well on the bottom as on the form. The characteristic of the institutional saving in Commons is indeed to mobilize concepts which are clean for him and which one in addition does not find in economy.
According to Commons, the error of the economists was to be unaware of the importance of the class action suit while being focused only on the individual actions. In addition, these same economists concentrated on the relationship between the men and nature where, according to Commmons, they are the reports/ratios of the men between them which import. To correct these two failures, Commons introduces two key concepts, the institutions and the transactions. The institutions are defined like " class action suits in control, the release and the expansion of the action individuelle". Commons then distinguishes the abstract institutions (the habit) from the formal institutions (organizations such as the State, the company or the trade unions). The transaction constitutes as for it the unit of analysis. It indicates the interaction by which two or several individuals exchange property rights and liberty of action. The project of Commons was in fact to work out a conceptual framework making it possible to include/understand how the institutions of the capitalist company had evolved/moved and to determine which were the factors at the origin of this evolution.

The defense of a reasonable capitalism

The characteristic of the work of Commons is to articulate the legal and economic considerations constantly. According to its own words, the objective of Commons was to join together the economy, the right and ethics. It was acted in fact for Commons of including/understanding how the spheres legal and economic were influenced mutually and the part which played, in these reports/ratios, the beliefs and the human values. Accordingly, Commons paid an special attention to the part played by the jurisprudence of the Supreme court. He indeed sees in the judge one of the major actors of what he called the " selection artificielle" rules and economic behaviors. More largely, Commons was harnessed to emphasize the part played by certain institutions (the State, companies, courts) in the evolution of the rules framing the activity économique.
The essential contributions of Commons are in the fields of the economy of work, the cash economy and the public economy. These contributions form a whole intended to explain the factors contributing to the evolution of capitalism. The special attention given by Commons to the problems of work, in particular concerning the asymmetry of being able between the employers and the employees, in particular led it to defend the idea of a " capitalism raisonnable" , i.e. an economic system where, while preserving the system of allowance of the resources offered by the market, the actors would agree to take part in negotiations to define criteria of distribution of income " raisonnable".

Major works (nonexhaustive)

_ has off Documentary History American Industrial Society , 1910
_ History off Labor in The United States , 1918 (flight I, II) and 1935 (vol. III, IV)
_ Legal Foundations off Capitalism , 1924
_ Institutional Economics. Its Places in Political Economy , 1934
_ The Economics off Collective Action , 1950

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