The article offers a survey of some of the ideas of Karl Marx in the context of the subsequent development of the new institutional economic theory in the 20th - early 21st centuries. It discusses various aspects of the unity of the historical and the logical in Marx’s Capital in the light of various ways of combining the historical and the theoretical in economic research, including a new economic history. The article considers the issues of the linkages between the problems of import and transplantation of institutes and the export of production relations, as well as the interaction of institutes and technologies, but in the context of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations, and possible parallels between the initial ideas of transaction costs and costs of circulation in the second volume of Marx’s Capital. It discusses the fundamental question of the absolute law of capital accumulation in the context of two key aspects of institutes - coordination and distribution.
