John R. Commons: Liberty

“Liberty is absence of restraint. Freedom is participation in government.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 111

Freedom

“Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 53

“But institutional economics is the field of the public interest in private ownership, which shows itself behavioristically in buying and selling, borrowing and lending, hiring and firing, leasing and renting. The private interests become the field of intangible yet quantitative and measurable rights, duties, liberties and exposures to the liberties of others. These are various aspects of rights of ownership. What we buy and sell is not material things and services but ownership of materials and services. The correlation of engineering economics, home economics, and institutional economics makes up the whole of the science of political economics.”

John R. Commons

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 243

Home , Science

“Liberty is as much a matter of compulsion as duty, but where duty says to a person that he must or must not, liberty says to other persons that they must not interfere with that person, or that they even must help to prevent still other persons from interfering, if necessary.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 95

Help , Personality

“The division of opinion turns on the definition of property and the scope of contract. Physical things of themselves are powerless. Even liberty to choose between opportunities is passive and ineffective. But power to withhold opportunities is economic power, and associated power is government. When therefore liberty of contract is merged with property, it adds the liberty of persons to the exclusive holding of things. And this liberty operates in the several directions of liberty to combine their property into an industrial government and to act as a unit, not only in proportioning their resources economically but also in choosing opportunities, in commanding obedience, in persuading or coercing, and in planning for the expectations of an indefinite future.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 320

Future , Personality

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons

"Institutional Economics," 1931

Pleasure , School , Behavior , Nature

“Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 118

“The ‘liberty’ of one is his permission to act as he pleases, supported against interference by the power of the concern or government”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 99

Support

“The smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity — a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons

Source: "Institutional Economics," 1931, p. 652

Pleasure , Nature

“The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.”

John R. Commons

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 32

Law , Idea , Nature