ure or ruling class is that they have become corrupted by the institutions peculiar to their class, and have lost touch with this instinct.
As expressed by Lerner (1950, pp. 41-42), ôThere is an excess of optimism in [VeblenÆs] belief that the central drive in man is the instinct of workmanship--the constructive bent, the hatred of futility, the solicitude for creation, and for peace in which to create. Veblen recognized that there are massive obstructions to this instinctual drive, but he found the obstructions not in manÆs primal and permanent endowment but in the institutions that have risen to plague him.ö
Veblen uses such ordinary terms as instinct and institution with new definitions he has devised for him. In biology an instinct is essentially innate knowledge--a bird knows how to build a precise kind of nest by instinct; the procedure is apparently programmed into its genes--but this is not what Veblen meant. He does think that since, in the Darwinian scheme he had adapted, human beings began as non-rational apes at sometime in the far-distant past, they must have begun with such instincts, but through the selection process of evolution, these instincts were gradually replaced with the ability to learn all behavior. (The modern anthropological view is that Homo sapiens did stop
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