WHY INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS MATTERS AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS Available to Purchase

By now, it is one of the standard tropes of those who write about the professionalization of American economics that there was a methodenstreit between the marginalists and the historicists at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. As recently as last year, Nancy Cohen (2002) argued that the only problem with this picture is that we have not understood correctly that the marginalists had actually won much sooner than we realized, sometime before 1900. Dorothy Ross’s classic The Origins of Amercian Social Science (1991) plays off the same dichotomy, but offers the older chronology, that “[b]etween about 1890 and 1910 marginal economics became the dominant paradigm in American economics.”