“it is useful to make a few observations concerning the nature of institutionalism in its early years. Two related characteristics stand out. The first of these is a shared notion of science as involving some form of empirical “realism,” and the second is a view of economic and social arrangements or institutions as in need of significant reform. In Dorothy Ross’s words, “what fuelled the institutionalist ambition was an overflow of realism and new liberal idealism that could not be contained by neoclassical practice” (Ross 1991, p. 411; Rutherford 1997””
The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control
