| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Yuval P. Yonay. The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America between the Wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 290.

Yuval P. Yonay had the splendid idea of reexamining the substantial contributions of the institutionalist school of economics, which flourished in the United States from the last years of the nineteenth century into the 1930s and then faded away. Its leaders included the scintillating dissenter Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), the creatively reforming John R. Commons (1862–1945)), and Wesley C. Mitchell (1874–1948), founder of the still active, although not quite influential, National Bureau of Economic Research. One can recognize a survivor, living on into his and through the century's nineties, in the variously celebrated John Kenneth Galbraith, who mediated the acceptance of Keynesianism but remained, despite his demurrers, essentially an institutionalist. 1

An energetic researcher armed with a sophisticated professional ideology, Yonay has masterfully stage-managed "the struggle over the soul of economics" between the institutional and neoclassical schools. He has ambitiously separated it into struggles over the "meaning of science," "the scope of economics," "reality and theory," "social relevance and values," and "the history of the discipline," as he entitles chapters four through eight. His admittedly "pro-institutionalist narrative" (p. 76) has to record a series of defeats, although he could show that the institutionalists provided a greater thickness and wealth to economic policy. Why did they fall out of action and memory so fast? This leads to a series of other questions centering on Pontius Pilate's. . . .

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