Bio

Malcolm Rutherford received a BA from the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, an MA from Simon Fraser University, and a PhD from the University of Durham in England.  He joined the Department of Economics at UVic in 1977.  He was Chair of the Department from 1991 to 1999.  He has held visiting scholar positions at Columbia University (2000) and the London School of Economics (2003), and has been president of the History of Economics Society and the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

His research has a particular focus on American economic institutionalism.  Early in his career he wrote a series of papers commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of approach by key American institutional economists, such as Veblen, Commons, Mitchell, and Ayres. Following the rise of “new institutionalism” in the 1980s, he wrote on the differences and commonalities between “old institutionalism” and “new institutionalism.”  His 1994 Cambridge University Press book Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism, emphasized common ground between the approaches.

His more recent work has focused on studying the rise of institutional economics in America, its important contributions to mainstream American economic thought in the interwar period, and its eventual eclipse by the neoclassical approach after WWII.  Much of this later research has been archival in nature.  Some of the research concerns the role of major foundations and research centers in the US in the development of economic thought.  This work is brought together in a forthcoming book The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947: Science and Social Control, to be published by Cambridge University Press. 

Professor Rutherford was given the Faculty of Social Sciences Award for Research Excellence in 2009.  He is currently on the editorial boards of History of Political Economy, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Journal of Institutional Economics, and the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

Publications

Selected Publications (for complete list, check Dr. Rutherford's Website):

Books:

• The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947: Science and Social Control, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994.

Journal Articles:

• Understanding Institutional Economics: 1918-1929. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 22 (2000): 277-308.
• Institutional Economics: Then and Now. Journal of Economic Perspectives 15 (2001): 173-194
• “Who’s Afraid of Arthur Burns?”  The NBER and the Foundations. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 27 (2005): 109-139.
• The Institutionalist Reaction to Keynesian Economics (with Tyler DesRoches).  Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30 (2008): 29-48
• Did Commons have Few Followers? Continuing my Conversation with Yngve Ramstad.  Journal of Economic Issues 33 (June, 2009): 441-448.
• Towards a History of American Institutional Economics. Presidential Address to the Association for Evolutionary Economics. Journal of Economic Issues 33 (June, 2009): 308-318.
• Science and Social Control: The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 3 (Autumn, 2010): 47-71.
• The Judicial Control of Business: Walton Hamilton, Antitrust, and Chicago. Seattle University Law Review 34 (4, 2011): 1385-1407.
• The USDA Graduate School: Government Training in Statistics and Economics, 1920-1945. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 33 (2011) in press.
  

Courses

ECON 103, Principles of Microeconomics

ECON 337, History of Economic Thought to 1870

ECON 338, History of Economic Thought from 1870

ECON 407, Topics in the History of Economic Thought

Research Projects