Did Commons Have Few Followers? Continuing my Conversation with Yngve Ramstad

Yngve Ramstad claimed that John R. Commons had few followers and that his ideas had relatively little influence on others, at least partly because of the difficulties of separating particular aspects of Commons' work from his whole system of thought. In contrast, the argument in this paper is that Commons' work did have important impacts in a number of areas such as industrial relations, macroeconomic stabilization, and organizational theory, and that in these cases specific ideas from Commons were utilized in a form that did not involve taking over other aspects on his thinking.