The Social and Psychological Setting of Veblen's Economic Theory*

David Riesman

The Journal of Economic History, 1953, vol. 13, issue 4, 449-461

Abstract: In Veblen's own critique of other economists—andtion of his theory is just that—he relied securely on quasi-Marxist a major por-simplicities concerning causation. Other economists “got that way” because they were members of or sycophants of the kept classes, aristocratically disdainful of the actualities of production. Their theories, if they were classicists, were “superstructural” in the sense of being both above and behind the battle, for Veblen was one of the pioneers in the use of the culturallag concept which has done so much to confuse the understanding of the relations between technology and society. If they were American classicists, such as (in Veblen's view) J. B. Clark, diey were likely to couple a pallid reformism with their “fine-spun technicalities,” offering palliatives at the level of pecuniary theory for evils rooted in the very divorce of the pecuniary culture from its industrial base. And this reformism Veblen saw as a leisure-class product, along with female philanthropy, the arts and crafts movement, social work, and vegetarianism—the archaic by-products of the sheltered life of the better-off and the better-educated strata whose menial and hence life-giving work was done for them by others. Reformism was archaic because it was pre-evolutionary, pre-Darwinian; for Veblen, “A.D.” meant “After Darwin.” His emphasis on the datedness of economic theory—a charge to which Americans are especially sensitive since we like to be progressive and up-to-date—led Veblen to express recurrent hopes for the “younger generation” of economists, whom he wanted to make less literate and theoretical, less parasitic and less sanguine, less refined and more machine-minded. For Veblen as for Rousseau, what was young was less likely to be corrupted and spoiled.

Date: 1953
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