An extended version of the talk given upon receiving AFEE’s 2025 Veblen-Commons Award.

Itshows a “German” way towards Evolutionary Institutional Economics in an Original Institutional Economicsperspective.

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 gatheringat the “University in Exile” in New York 1933 and the following years.

Biographical and organizationalprocesses were interrelated in the 1980s through the establishment of EAEPE with the support of AFEE. Thecontributions in the last forty-five years have been epistemological (economics as a contested multiparadigmaticdiscipline and Kuhnian losses in the mainstream), HET-related (e.g., retrieving Adam Smith’s theory ofinstitutional emergence), and real-world based as regards regional and industrial networking and policies.

Weelaborated on institutional emergence, with careful modeling and hermeneutics, on the conceptualization ofinstitutions and Veblen’s institutional dichotomy, and critical factors of institutional development, addinglogical and computational dimensions.

We analyzed issues such as general trust, social leverage, hybrid andembedded 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.