Die institutionelle Revolution: Eine Einführung in die deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts [The institutional revolution: An introduction to German economic history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]

Die institutionelle Revolution: Eine Einführung in die deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts [The institutional revolution: An introduction to German economic history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]. By Clemens Wischermann and Anne Nieberding. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. 309 pp. Figures, bibliography, notes. Paper, euro24.00. ISBN: 3-515-08477-0.

That economic historians are beginning to turn to institutional economics for answers is a result of economists' increasing willingness to sidestep neoclassical model theory without relapsing into noneconomic explanatory models. Advocates of cooperation between economics and economic history see the possibility of closing the gaps that have existed between the two fields and reconciling their differences about the economy, which have intensified since the decline of the historical school of economics. Nevertheless, success in this endeavor will depend on the ability of the institutional economic method to yield fruitful explanations of historical problems.

Economic historian Clemens Wischermann (University of Konstanz) and business historian Anne Nieberding, who regrettably died soon after completion of this book, are not only convinced of the usefulness of institutional economics to the field of history; they also believe that, in order to render a plausible account of the origins of Western modernity, they can replace the dominant neoclassical paradigm of the "Industrial Revolution" with the model of the "Institutional Revolution." The "European miracle" thus would be explained by the constitution of...