Veblen's Concepts of Human Nature

The purpose of this paper is to describe Thorstein Veblen's 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.

Veblen's ideas about instincts appear early in Theory of the Leisure Class. In the Introduction, he proposes that a human being "is 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 ma

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ic files recorded in memory, but they do seem to have inherent formatting that will accept only certain kinds of files. Veblen also studied with William Graham Sumner, whose basic concepts about social institutions and evolution became part of the infrastructure of Veblen's later thought. Lerner (1950, p. 23) says that Veblen defined the term institution very vaguely, as a clustering of habits and customs, ways of doing things and thinking about things, all sanctioned by long practice and community approval. That is, Veblen meant something like the contents of a culture, not something as narrow as a specific type of social organization. Veblen thought that human nature had developed over a long evolutionary span, but had become relatively fixed at some recent time, and that humans have basically peaceful instincts that have been overlaid with warlike institutions. He also thought that the instinct for workmanship had been overlaid by the institution of the leisure class, and apparently thought that the evolution of this institution began when the first shaman became the first non-food-producing specialist in a hunting-and-gathering society many millennia ago. That is, humans did not originally find work irksome, and mentally he

Category: Psychology - V