Born in Hollansburg, Ohio, John R. Commons had a religious upbringing which led him to be an advocate for social justice early in life. After graduating from Oberlin College, Commons earned his PhD at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under Richard T. Ely and, following a series of academic appointments, landed at the University of Wisconsin in 1902.

Commons' early work exemplified his desire to unite Christian ideals with the emerging social sciences of sociology and economics. He was a frequent contributor to Kingdom magazine, was a founder of the American Institute for Christian Sociology, and authored a book in 1894 called Social Reform and the Church. He was an advocate of temperence legislation and was active in the national Prohibition Party. By his Wisconsin years, Commons' scholarship had become less moralistic and more empirical, however.

Commons believed that carefully crafted legislation could create social change; this view led him to be known as a conservative radical and incrementalist. He also believed that the so-called white races were more fit for democracy than the so-called tropical races, and his 1907 book Races and Immigrants in America helped lay the groundwork for the later eugenics movement.

Commons is best known for developing an analysis of collective action by the state and other institutions, which he saw as essential to understanding economics.In this analysis, he continued the strong American tradition in institutional economics by such figures as the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen. His notion of transaction is one of the most important contribution to Institutional Economics. This institutional theory was closely related to his remarkable successes in fact-finding and drafting legislation on a wide range of social issues for the state of Wisconsin. He drafted legislation establishing Wisconsin's worker's compensation program, the first of its kind in the United States.

In 1934, Commons published Institutional Economics which laid out his view that institutions were made up of collective actions that, along with conflict of interests, defined the economy. In Commons' view, institutional economics added collective control of individual transactions to existing economic theory.

Commons was a contributor to The Pittsburgh Survey, an 1907 sociological investigation of a single American city. His graduate student, John A. Fitch, wrote The Steel Workers, a classic depiction of a key industry in early twentieth-century America. It was one of six key texts to come out of the survey. Edwin E. Witte, later known as the "father of social security" also did his PhD at the University of Wisconsin—Madison under Commons.

Commons undertook two major studies of the history of labor unions in the United States. Beginning in 1910, he edited A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, a large work which preserved many original source documents of the American labor movement. Almost as soon as that work was complete, Commons began editing History of Labor in the United States, a narrative work which built on the previous 10-volume documentary history.

Today, Commons' contribution to labor history is considered equal to his contributions to the theory of institutional economics. He also made valuable contributions to the history of economic thought, especially with regard to collective action. His racist writing is not well-known today, and he is honored at the University of Wisconsin in Madison with rooms and clubs named for him.

• "...An institution is defined as collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action."
• "...But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged..."

--"Institutional Economics" American Economic Review, vol. 21 (1931), pp. 648—657.

• "The Chinese and Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British mechanic." --Races and Immigrants in America pg. 131.

• "Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized--the negro has only been domesticated." --Races and Immigrants in America pg. 41.

Solely authored works

• The Distribution of Wealth. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1893.
• Industrial Goodwill. New York: McGraw Hill, 1919.
• Institutional Economics. New York: Macmillan, 1934.
• Labor and Administration. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
• Legal Foundations of Capitalism. New York: Macmillan, 1924.
• Myself. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1934.
• Proportional Representation. New York: Crowell, 1896.
• Races and Immigrants in America. New York: Macmillan, 1907.
• Social Reform and the Church. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1894.

Co-authored works

• Commons, John R. and Andrews, J. B. Principles of Labor Legislation. New York: Harper and Bros., 1916.
• Commons, John R.; Parsons, Kenneth H.; and Perlman, Selig. The Economics of Collective Action. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
• Commons, John R., et al. History of Labor in the United States. Vols. 1-4. New York: Macmillan, 1918-1935.
• Commons, John R., et al. Industrial Government. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Edited works

• Commons, John R. (Ed.). A Documentary History of American Industrial Society. Vols. 1-10. Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1910.
• Commons, John R. (Ed.). Trade Unionism and Labor Problems. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1905.

• Barbash, Jack. "John R. Commons: Pioneer of Labor Economics," Monthly Labor Review 112:5 (May 1989) [1]
• Coats, A.W. "John R. Commons as a Historian of Economics: The Quest for the Antecedents of Collective Action" in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol.1, 1983.
• Commons, John R. Myself. Reprint ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
• Dorfman, Joseph. The Economic Mind in American Civilization: 1918-1933. Vols. 4 and 5. Reissue ed. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publications, 1969. ISBN 0-678-00540-0
• Fitch, John A. The Steel Workers. Reprint ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1910 (1989). ISBN 0-8229-6091-5.
• Parson, Kenneth. "John R. Commons Point of View," Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (Land Economics) 18(3):245-60(1942).
• Samuels, Warren. "Reader's Guide to John R. Commons Legal Foundations of Capitalism," in Warren Samuels, ed. Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Archival Supplement 5, Amsterdam: Elsevier 1996.
• "John R. Commons, 1862-1945," History of Economic Thought, The New School
• Thayer Watkins, "John R. Commons and His Economic Philosophy," San Jose State University.
• Kemp, Thomas. Progress and Reform, Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2009.

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