Was Frank Knight an Institutionalist?

Abstract

Abstract This paper critically examines Geoffrey Hodgson's provocative claim that Frank Knight was a member of the American institutionalist school in the interwar years. In the first section of the paper we provide a definition of institutionalism and emphasize its meaning from a historiographic point of view. The second and third sections analyse the two main methodological struggles between Knight and the institutionalists, namely, the debate during the early 1920s over the use of instinct theory as an explanation of economic behaviour, and the subsequent campaign led by Knight in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the behaviourist wing of American institutionalism à la Copeland and Ayres. The fourth section deals with Knight's own brand of institutionalism. Our main conclusions are that, even if Knight's approach to the study of economic behaviour shows significant affinities with American institutionalism, he was not—both sociologically and in terms of his philosophical premises—an institutionalist.