Warner Winslow Gardner's The Institutional Theory of John R. Commons (1933)

Warner Winslow Gardner's notes on The Institutional Theory of John R. Commons (1933) are published here for the first time, as far as the present editors can determine. The typewritten manuscript was found among the Robert Lee Hale papers at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.2 Gardner (1909–2003) was born in Richmond, Indiana. He went to Westtown School, a Quaker preparatory school in Pennsylvania for five years, and then to Swarthmore College, graduating in 1930. To escape unemployment, as he stated in his recorded reminiscences, Gardner took graduate work on a fellowship at Rutgers University, receiving a Master of Arts Degree in economics in 1931.3 From there he went to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1934. Quite significantly, Gardner attributed his decision of shifting from economics to law to his reading of Commons’ Legal Foundation of Capitalism:It would be 1930–31 and, in the course of that year, I read and was much impressed by a book by John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin in which he tried to weave together economics and law. I thought, “aha,” here is a field that had real attraction and real potentiality. I ended up with an MA at the end of that year. Instead of going for a Ph.D. in economics, I thought I’d go to law school, study law and try to weave the two disciplines together into a meaningful structure.