Abstract (EN)

The paper aims to show the overall coherence of the system of thought Commons employed to build his institutional economics. For that and in order not to stay enclosed within the American context Commons’ ideas have been considered to be dependent upon, we read him through the methodological glasses of Piaget’s structuralist genetic epistemology which shares many common features with the pragmatist method of Commons. The first section of the paper states the legitimacy of the structuralist approach of Commons’ work. The second section presents his conceptual system’s architecture, designed with the tools of morphogenetic structuralism. A third section is devoted to the uneasy question of correlations of economics, Law, and Ethics Commons places at the heart of institutional economics.