Institutionalism, a current in bourgeois political economy based primarily on the non-economic interpretation of the essence and motive forces of the economic processes of capitalism. Its basic category is institutions, which it understands as various psychological, legal and moral ethical phenomena (customs, habits, instincts), as well as social and socio-economic phenomena determined by them (the state, trade unions, corporations, competition, taxes, the family, etc). Institutionalism made its appearance in the late 19th century as a response to the changing ideological and practical requirements of the burgeoisie as a class, as free enterprise capitalism was evolving into imperialism. The school was founded by the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Its most eminent representatives are American economists and sociologists William Hamilton, John Commons, William Mitchell, John Galbraith, Daniel Bell, Robert Heilbroner, the Swedish scientist Gunnar Myrdal, and the French economist Francois Perroux. The basic aim of institutionalism is to defend the interests of the monopolies and state- 166 monopoly capitalism. This school was one of the first trends of vulgar bourgeois political economy to try and justify state-monopoly capitalism. State interference in the economy in the interest of the monopolies is presented as the introduction of "social control" over production or the organisation of a "regulated economy”. The “institution” category is used to gloss over the class division of bourgeois society into exploited wage labourers and the exploiting bourgeoisie, and to conceal the class antagonisms in capitalist society. Institutionalism also tries to dilute within this category the difference between the twinned main aspects of the capitalist mode of production: the productive forces and relations of production, and thus divert people from understanding the inevitable exacerbation of the basic contradiction of capitalism and the historical inevitability of socialist revolution. The institutionalism conceptions are socially heterogeneous. This fact and the vagueness of the concept of “institution” explain the absence of an integral economic theory. Institutionalism is represented by four schools: 1) psychobiological ( Veblen), which justifies the state of things under capitalism because it is allegedly the product of human nature and human customs; 2) socio-legal (Commons), which regards legal relations as the factors determining the socio-economic essence of the production relations of capitalism; this makes it possible, on the grounds of legal fetishism, to gloss over the exploiting nature of the capitalist mode of production and portray the relations between labour and capital as equal relations between legal parties, and to reduce the “criticism” of capitalism to censuring a few instances of blatant lawlessness and tyranny; 3) empirical (Mitchell), which tries to develop statistical methods to justify certain capitalist realities (economic cycles, crises, economic growth rates, etc.); 4) production-fetishist (Galbraith), which seeks to provide an apologetic explanation for the socio-economic essence of modern capitalism through fetishising modern largescale industrial production and the phenomena produced by the current scientific and technological revolution. The latter school ignores the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of production and the fundamental difference between the capitalist and socialist social systems as it tries to reveal the features of the “industrial” and “post-industrial” societies it proclaims (see Theory of Industrial Society) directly in the specific features of today’s large-scale industrial production. In the 1960s and 1970s the role of institutionalism grew, which is very indicative of the deepening crisis in current bourgeois economic thought.