2026 Veblen-Commons Award Recipient: Wolfram Elsner Contributing to EIE/OIE … A Long and Winding RoadSome Heterodox Historio- and Bio-Graphy: From the Younger German Historical School through German Social Economics to Post-WWII …

An extended version of the talk given upon receiving AFEE’s 2025 Veblen-Commons Award. It shows a “German” way towards Evolutionary Institutional Economics in an Original Institutional Economics perspective. That “road” was rooted in the Younger German Historical and German Social Economics Schools (1920s and 1930s), which had survived Nazism and WWII through German economist-refugees gathering at the “University in Exile” in New York 1933 and the following years. Biographical and organizational processes were interrelated in the 1980s through the establishment of EAEPE with the support of AFEE. The contributions in the last forty-five years have been epistemological (economics as a contested multiparadigmatic discipline and Kuhnian losses in the mainstream), HET-related (e.g., retrieving Adam Smith’s theory of institutional emergence), and real-world based as regards regional and industrial networking and policies. We elaborated on institutional emergence, with careful modeling and hermeneutics, on the conceptualization of institutions and Veblen’s institutional dichotomy, and critical factors of institutional development, adding logical and computational dimensions. We analyzed issues such as general trust, social leverage, hybrid and embedded organization, complex innovation, and institutional collapse, and fields such as meso-economics, the theory of institutional change, and institutional complexity economics. Value change, policy conceptions, and methodological reflection have been integral to these efforts.