Pour un programme d'économie institutionnaliste

Drawing upon the papers of Luc Boltanski, Philippe Mongin and Michael Piore, this text presents the basic elements of a new institutionalist economics. Its main thrust is to work out the relationship between the economy and systems of moral judgment. As such, it would serve as a counterweight to conventional economic theory, whose ambition is to create a wholly positive theory of economy behavior and whose normative content is confined to the new welfare economics, build around the concept of Pareto optimality. This approach fails to recognize that the economic agents themselves use frameworks of moral judgment to organize their transactions, especially, but not only, in the labor market. Indeed, because the agents act in this way, a recognition and analysis of moral values and principles of justice and their role in governing transactions is critical to a positive theory of economic behavior itself. Classification JEL : A12, B20, B40, D21, D60, Z13