Anti-Auzan: The Critique of a Social Philosophy. Part 2

Abstract

John Commons emphasized that his institutional economics is based on the pragmatism of Charles Peirce as a research method and on the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey in his vision of the subject of research. The rejection by the new institutional economics (NIE) of the pragmatist philosophy is the basis for its radical deformations of the conceptual apparatus of the original institutionalism. This concerns the vision of human nature, the concept of social institution, and the notion of transactions. This paper criticizes deformation of these concepts by NIE in the book “Economics of Everything. How institutions determine our life” by A. A. Auzan, the dean of the Department of Economics of Moscow State University. The critique is based on a modernized presentation of these concepts initially introduced in the institutional economics of J. Commons. A. A. Auzan, like many authors of textbooks of NIE, followed the path dependence of the profession of the Soviet “politeconomist”. Just as specialists in political economy of socialism relied on Marxism, which served as an ideology that created the Soviet social order, so A. A. Auzan tries to interpret the post-Soviet social order in terms of NIE, which reflects the ideology that gave rise to this order, i.e. the ideology of neoliberalism.