ABSTRACT
Historically, economists have been rather reluctant to deal with human rights. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), as a leading proponent of utilitarianism, famously called them “nonsense on stilts.” Representatives of the so-called classical or old institutionalism such as Gustav von Schmoller (1838-1917) from the German Historic School and John Commons (1862-1945), Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), and Wesley Mitchell (1874-1948) from the American Institutionalist School criticized the neoclassical market model for completely ignoring interest confl icts, social relationships, and the importance of institutions, but their infl uence on the mainstream of economic research in the twentieth century is negligible.
