The purpose of this paper is to describe Thorstein VeblenÆs concepts of human nature, of instincts, and of how these functioned in the evolution of human society. It will also look at how he uses these concepts in his analysis of economic behavior.
Veblen was born in Wisconsin in 1857. He studied at Carleton College in Minnesota, then went on to receive his Ph.D. from Yale in 1884. However, he was unable to find an academic position until he became an instructor at the University of Chicago in 1896. His first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, was published in 1899. In it he attempted to apply Darwinian ideas about evolution to the study of modern economic life. (This was not exactly a novel idea; Lewis Henry Morgan had first applied Darwinian concepts to describe the evolution of human social institutions in his Ancient Society, published several decades earlier.) His book, filled with acerbic observations on the wealthy in America, caught the interest of the literary world, and was read more as satire than as science; he thus acquired a reputation as a social critic that extended far beyond his academic horizons.
VeblenÆs ideas about instincts appear early in Theory of the Leisure Class. In the Introduction, he proposes that a human being ôis an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end . . . [and so] is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. . . . The aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship . . . [which] works out in an emulative demonstration of forceö (15). Later he proposes that this instinct ôexpresses itself . . . in an abiding sense of the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futileö (93). That is, he is arguing that humans instinctively prefer activities that confer real, concrete benefits on society to those that serve merely to entertain. What is wrong with the leis...