Introduction to the Douglass C. North memorial issue

Abstract

This introduction considers the highly influential contribution of Douglass C. North to economic history and institutional economics, as it developed from the 1960s until his death in 2015. It sketches the evolution of his arguments concerning the roles of institutions, organizations and human agency. North's conception of the economic actor became progressively more sophisticated, by acknowledging the role of ideology and adopting insights from cognitive science. Eventually, he abandoned the proposition that institutions are generally efficient, to propose instead that sub-optimal institutional forms could persist. A few noted criticisms of North's work are also considered here, ranging from those which are arguably off the mark, to others that retain some force. The contributions to this memorial issue are outlined at the end of this introduction.

History of Economic Thought as an Analytic Tool: why Past Intellectual Ideas Must Be Acknowledged as Lighthouses for the Future

“…Douglas V. North and R.W. Fogel, two Nobel laureates in economics during the 1990s, worked exactly on those grounds, empirically and methodologically (Greif and Mokyr 2017;Hodgson 2017; Diebolt and Haupert 2018) making a plea for institutional and historical economics and for the need to collect data.…”

Clément Juglar and Algeria: three pillars of modern anti-colonial criticism

“…Juglar explained the failure of French colonialism in Algeria through the lens of institutional economics. In assessing Algeria, Juglar was confronted with the difficult problem of explaining institutional change, a question that has characterized the research agenda of Nobel Laureate Douglas North for decades (Hodgson, 2017). Three institutional explanations are put forward for the ultimate failure of French colonialism; the first, insufficient property rights; the second, inappropriate regulation and the instability of colonial institutions; and the third, the use of distortive subsidies and the absence of incentives.…”

“…Hodgson (2017) suggests that failure to protect property rights ‘opened the door to an understanding of the possible endurance of inefficient institutions’. The aforementioned is important.…”

Democracy without political parties: the case of ancient Athens

“…Fleck and Hanssen (2018) recently review the application of economic methodology to the political institutions of ancient Greece. 2 http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199546091.001.0001/acref-9780199546091-e-9204?rskey=8zd8G3&result=13 For the distinction between institutions and organizations seeNorth (1990) andNorth et al (2009); for critical comments regarding the possible nexus between the two and the confusion surrounding this distinction, seeHodgson (2017).…”