Institutionalism as the way of unification of the heterodox theories

In this article we seek to show that there is a common framework to the various approaches known as heterodox. This framework is the “institutionalism”, which take into account the concrete institutions in which the economic process proceeds. To argue our thesis we deploy two types of justification. We begin with an historical justification which borrows from the history of the thought and will find in emblematic authors (Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Polanyi) (1) the definition of a common object for an institutionalist political economy (the study of a “Monetary economy of capitalistic production”); (2) a common general standard of the economy like “an institutionalized process between men and environment” (against the definition of Robbins). Our second justification is a more epistemological one. We develop the way in which the institutionalist approach mobilizes the concepts of action and of institution. The goal of this article is to contribute to the emergence of a positive paradigm, common to the heterodox, which is not defined any more in hollow or negative in opposition to the neo­classic “main stream”.