The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

By Anthem Press

Amidst cascading global financial and political crises of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, scholars have turned for insight to the work of the radical American thinker, Thorstein Veblen. Inspired by an abundance of new research, social scientists from multiple disciplines have displayed a heightened appreciation for Veblen’s importance and value for contemporary social, economic and political studies. “The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen,” edited with an introduction by Sidney Plotkin, is a stimulating addition to this new body of Veblen scholarship.

The essays in the first part consider Veblen’s method, philosophy and values. Sociologist Erkki Kilpinen peers deeply into Veblen’s highly original theory of action and its implications for a sociological understanding of “the instinct of workmanship.” In contrast, economist William Waller, building on contemporary work in evolutionary economics and psychology, urges a considerably more bio-psychological interpretation of Veblen’s instinct theory. Intellectual historians Rick Tilman and Kohl Glau, exploring the secular foundations of Veblen’s moral theory, furnish a sharp critique of recent efforts to wed Veblen with Catholic social thought. Challenging older understandings, Russell H. and Sylvia E. Bartley, careful students of Veblen’s biography, offer novel insights into the impact of Veblen’s education at Carlton College, while sociologist Stephan G. Mestrovic thoughtfully insists that Veblen unduly limited his affirmation of “idle curiosity” as a chief resource for learning to elite post graduate schools.

Contemporary applications of Veblen’s theory to studies of capitalism, social structure and politics are the focus of the contributions in the next part. Anthropologist John Kelly forcefully urges a reconsideration of Veblen’s critical theory as an inspiration for both students and activists in an age of capitalism “after post-modernism and post-coloniality.” Returning to Veblen’s most important early work, sociologist Ahmet Oncu skillfully weaves the theory of the leisure class into a rich and exciting re-interpretation of Turkey’s Ottoman ruling groups. Building on Veblen’s critical theory of absentee ownership and power, political scientist Sidney Plotkin analyzes Veblen’s embrace of local forms of political economic self-rule, but notes Veblen’s sense of the ideological ambiguity of popular resistance to centralized power. Finally, geographer Ross Mitchell applies the radical democratic potential of Veblen’s concept of “the masterless man” to an understanding of both the possibilities and limits of contemporary left movements. Throughout, the essays offer fresh material for ongoing reconsiderations of Thorstein Veblen as a major theoretical resource for the contemporary social sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783085095

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The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA / Australian Catholic University, Australia / University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming titles

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

Edited by Sidney Plotkin

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Names: Plotkin, Sidney, editor.

Title: The Anthem companion to Thorstein Veblen / [edited by] Sidney Plotkin.

Description: London ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2017. | Series: Anthem companions to sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017006962 | ISBN 9781783082797 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Veblen, Thorstein, 1857–1929. | Economics. | Economics–Sociological aspects.

Classification: LCC HB119. V4 A58 2017 | DDC 330.092–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006962

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-279-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-279-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Sam, Rachel, Joanna and Joseph, their humanity and their laughter.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Toil in the field of Veblen scholarship can be a lonely affair. Thanks to organizations such as the International Thorstein Veblen Association (ITVA) and the Internet, which allows conversation to flourish across oceans and time zones, I have enjoyed the fruits of advice, cooperation, collegiality and friendship. I owe special debts in this regard to the late Art Vidich, who originally urged me to join the ITVA, and to the inspiration of Franco Ferrarotti and Rick Tilman, scholars of the first rank, who persuaded me to believe that I might have something worthwhile to say about Veblen and politics. Of course, this collection would have been impossible without the heartfelt scholarly dedication and labor of its globe-spanning contributors. Their insight, effort and cooperation made my editorial work far more pleasurable than I originally imagined it might be. I am greatly beholden to them for such value as this collection may possess. Plaudits as well to Vincent Rajan and the production team at Anthem: their patient aid in guiding the manuscript through its final stages was as helpful as it was stress free. I remain deeply indebted to my colleagues in the Political Science Department of Vassar College. My turn toward writing and teaching about Veblen would likely not have developed without their support. Their welcoming of changes in a colleague’s intellectual direction speaks volumes about the department’s zealous commitment to freedom of inquiry and the adventure of learning. I owe an equal, perhaps greater, debt to my students. Their thirst for understanding politics—and Veblen too—has afforded me the greatest pleasure and reward of my teaching life. In more personal ways, my wife, Aura, deserves my infinite gratitude for her love. Her forbearance with my many grumbles amid the labor of writing merits equal thankfulness. I owe Nancy and David Gluck more thanks than I can enumerate, most of all for their enduring friendship through moments of pain as well as joy. Finally, I have dedicated this work to my children, Sam, Rachel, Joanna and my stepson, Joseph. Simply put, there is no greater reward for the parental bent than to watch children mature into responsible and generous human beings. They have privileged me to feel intensely what Veblen called fullness of life.

INTRODUCTION: THORSTEIN VEBLEN’S ELUSIVE PROJECT

Sidney Plotkin

Thorstein Veblen ranks among the more elusive but also rewarding and provocative thinkers in the classic tradition of social theory. Of course he is known best as the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), as sharp witted a satire of upper-class folly as was ever penned. The book’s key concept of conspicuous consumption rooted itself in everyday language: millions who have never heard of Veblen use his term every day. But Veblen’s first book is more than a wisecracking comedy of manners. It is an early important statement of his essentially evolutionary, Darwinian approach to explaining social institutions. It also rests on the crucial Veblenian distinction between industry and exploit, an idea that evokes the anthropological outlook he applied throughout his later explorations of social behavior. So while the book is a resounding critique of Gilded-Age American values—Veblen loved to remind patriotic American readers of their rabid affection for the trappings of European aristocratic culture—the book’s theoretical preoccupations should not be underestimated. They show us that Veblen and his outlook were grounded in more than his efforts at satire of his American setting and rural Minnesota upbringing. Such elements, for all their formative influence, were just that, points of departure for an insatiable curiosity and an intellectual project that was fundamentally theoretical in character and direction.

Veblen emerged from rural Minnesota to engage with thinkers, ideas and modes of analysis that reflected the deep reservoir of Western thought. Paying little heed to disciplinary boundaries, his writings transcend formulaic distinctions between economics, sociology, politics and psychology. Veblen alerts his readers to institutional intersections, to associations and linkages, to the tissue and fiber of connections between material and cultural life and the ways these inform political habits and constraints. Here are the sources of Veblen’s provocation.

Human beings are creatures of habit, he never fails to remind us; we live and work within long-established institutional grooves. But for all that, Veblen sees human beings as creatures that act. Humans live by doing things, by adapting to changing circumstance, however belatedly, and not by pure rote either. Man’s life is activity, wrote Veblen, and as he acts, so he thinks and feels (1898, 85). ¹ People modify their ways and means to meet pressures and changes in situation and environment. But not, as Karl Marx might say, just as we please. Prevailing habits and predominant institutions shape and channel our adaptive abilities; they keep us glued more or less to old ways even as we try to improve upon such old ways. Innovation bears inevitable legacies of anachronism. The Internet revolutionizes human communication, but its labyrinth of sites is filled with salesmanship, fabrication and pornographic exploitation. What technology enhances, predation contaminates.

Insistently—as often as not sardonically—Veblen put his method to work on behalf of an analysis of often self-impairing, self-defeating human action and pursuit. The life and future of the species remain all too uncertain as a result. Too often, for Veblen, human action twists toward irrational outcomes: economic crisis and war, chief among them. The continuity of our barbaric habits refutes any neat equations between modernity and progress. Though we have ample intellectual ability to adapt and survive, Veblen is far from sure that we will. History displays more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of societies that used their intelligence to save themselves from demise (Veblen, 1914, 25).

The essays in this volume grapple with many of the uncertainties Veblen compels us to face. They explore different aspects of his social theory: its foundations, inner tensions and contemporary applications, all with a view to helping us better understand both the contribution and the difficulty in Veblen’s work. While no unifying point of view binds the contributors, each aims in different ways better to understand Veblen’s characteristic interest in explaining human action, its roots, its specific institutional settings and situations and, not least, the possibilities and difficulties of progressive change.

Disagreement and divergence abound here. The Veblen literature is, after all, contentious, ripe with debate. Scholars regularly disagree about how his work should be understood, interpreted or applied. There is no party line in Veblen scholarship, and none exists here. This book offers diversity of emphasis, focus, interpretation and analysis. Such divergence is a credit to Veblen’s ability to stimulate inquiry. But it also reflects his penchant for fostering disagreement about just what he meant to say about crucial matters of method and substance. Like other writers in the classic tradition, Marx and Émile Durkheim, for example, Veblen tried to understand and explain how the various aspects of social order and social change impinge on everyday life. It is certainly reasonable to treat such analysis in disciplinary terms. Marx was a philosopher who became an economist, Durkheim was a sociologist and so on. But the cost of reducing these thinkers’ work to singlar disciplines is great. It is to understate, even to elide, the rich, cross-disciplinary understandings of social structure and social complexity that the classic writers convey.

Veblen’s indifference to such disciplinary categories is anything but unusual. It exemplifies the classic tradition of social theory. Certainly it would not be unreasonable to label him a sociologist or an economist. But as for how Veblen saw himself, the question is beside the point: he refused pigeonholes. Consider that he earned his Yale PhD in philosophy; at Cornell he studied history and constitutional law as well as economics; and at the University of Chicago and Stanford he taught culturally centered studies of material life. Any economic science worthy of the name must grasp the principles of culture and their influence upon the array of purposes for which human beings produce and exchange. No economist can adequately understand material civilization or economic action without going beyond material life and activity, that is, without taking into account their genetic relations to other phases and bearings of the cultural complex; without studying (material life) as it is wrought upon by other lines of cultural growth and as working its effects in these other lines (Veblen, 1909, 241, paren. added). Economics must be a cultural study, just as cultural analysis must bear witness to material life, industry and technology. In similar ways, political studies must remain studiously attentive to historical influences and patterns, for large remnants of antiquity and […] the Middle Ages pervade contemporary Western law and civil relations (Veblen, 1923, 14).

It is precisely this concern for the robust interplay of institutional and structural relationships and their reciprocal relations with human thought and action that binds the writers of the classic tradition. C. Wright Mills called it the sociological imagination, but he might as well have named it the political imagination or the historical imagination (Mills, 1959). The classic writers analyze the interplay in different ways, but it remains a chief unifying preoccupation of the tradition as a whole.

For most writers in this tradition it is not especially difficult to discover a kind of singular master key that governs their thought, a central idea that helps typify how they comprehend the synthesis of institutional patterns. For example, Thomas Hobbes’s master key is a human questing after power.John Locke looked to reason and natural rights.Adam Smith analyzed the phenomenon of exchange and the mysteries of human sympathy, finding its most rational elaboration in the novel form of market relations.Marx, strongly influenced by, but also dissenting from Locke and Smith, insisted that we have to first recognize that things must be produced before they can be exchange values.Max Weber, in different but related ways, suggested that a master key to social knowledge centers on recognizing a diverse human experience of reason, religion and authority, and most especially their contemporary apotheosis, the iron cage of irresistible administration and organization.Finally, Durkheim urged us to consider closely the integration of personality and norms as a foundational condition of stable social structure.

Virtually all the themes just noted—psychology, power, property, markets, production, class, exploitation, organization and bureaucracy, the formation of moral views—are significant themes in Veblen’s work too. His interests line up closely with those of the classic tradition. But where then might we find Veblen’s master key? This is not an easy question to answer. Indeed, I believe that it is probably the wrong question. It is perhaps on this point more than any other that students of Veblen tend to struggle, and it helps explain why the essays in the present volume vary so much in focus and tone.

Veblen’s elusiveness is a source of spirited disagreement. Some scholars point to the distinction between exploit and industry as the keynote of his work. They stress the pressing and enduring contradiction between human lust for intangible social honor matched against the pressing exigencies of real economic activity: our ever-present need to adapt to ceaselessly changing environments (Ayres, 1944; Bush, 1987). Others just as appropriately insist that Veblen’s main contribution, and the most salient aspect of his thought, lay in his application and development of Darwinian evolution to social life. They highlight Veblen’s studies of the genesis, growth, conservation and adaptation of social institutions to a changing environment. (Cordes, 2006; 2007); Hodgson 1998; 2001; 2008). These interpreters remind us of the crucial methodological, epistemological and ontological presuppositions underlying Veblen’s work, his notions of instinct, habit and institutions, for example, and how such ideas demand a grasp of Veblen’s deepest principles of evolutionary science and human knowledge. I could list other possibilities, but this short essay is not the place for a thorough examination of the Veblen literature. ²

Veblen’s intellectual labors have spurred intense debate, yet for much of the twentieth century his biography reflected a pretty uniformly accepted but distorted narrative of his persona. Veblen’s only major biographer, Joseph Dorfman (1934), created widely accepted negative perceptions of Veblen the man. More than any other source, Dorfman influenced Veblen’s iconic reputation as a bitterly eccentric, lonely and alien figure; the great academic misfit of American intellectual history; a theorist who, for all his penetrating insights, ultimately could not come to terms with what liberal orthodoxy saw as the promise and sweep of America’s democratic progress.

Dorfman attributed Veblen’s eccentricity to his upbringing as the offspring of marginalized Norwegian immigrants, struggling dirt farmers on the unforgiving plains of central Minnesota. Veblen rebelled against this marginality, this cultural inferiority, said Dorfman, endlessly blaming American institutions, especially American business and finance, for their baleful treatment of immigrant farmers and workers. The resulting image of Veblen as a kind of man from Mars became the popular scholarly trope. Encapsulating Veblen for his readers two decades after Dorfman, even as insightful a thinker as Mills could not escape Dorfman’s influence, declaring that Veblen was at once the best critic of America that America ever produced and yet a natural-born failure (1953, vi, viii). A curious combination indeed, yet this natural born failure succeeded academically at some of the nation’s most elite institutions, wrote some of the most influential books of his day and produced students who went on to influential careers of their own. Ironically, but for Veblen, few would know or read Dorfman today. If this is failure, I suspect that many contemporary professors would gladly sign up for it.

However Dorfman’s conclusions have recently been subjected to searching criticism and revision. New scholarship suggests more subtle understandings of Veblen the man and his experience (Edgell, 2001; Jorgensen and Jorgensen, 1999; Bartley and Bartley, 1999; Tilman, 1996a). Students of Veblen have uncovered considerable evidence of the Veblen family’s assimilation into American life and institutions, an assimilation that helped inform and enrich his incisive and richly informed critique of American institutions. Veblen wrote from within the American system, which he amply understood, but he was also deeply indebted to European thought. His doctoral dissertation, after all, analyzed not Ralph Waldo Emerson but Immanuel Kant. Yet such an observation only gets us back to our initial question: the difficulty of locating singular master keys to Veblen’s thought.

Many scholars applaud Veblen for inventing the category of conspicuous consumption. But too often this stress on consumption and honorific pursuit can make it seem as if the only thing Veblen wrote still worth reading is Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). ³ Yet except perhaps for his important later observations about corporate salesmanship and advertising, Veblen rarely discussed consumption as such again. Following Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen focused on questions of business organization and its contamination of the liberating possibilities of the machine process. He composed a series of penetrating, forceful criticisms of prevailing economic orthodoxy. These essays on the presuppositions and principles of mainstream economics remain essential reading in this neoliberal age (Veblen, 1919; 1969).From this point forward, it was evident that Veblen treated patterns of consumption inseparably from those of production. Absentee Ownership (1923), Veblen’s last major work of critical theory, and his only study devoted exclusively to the American case, repeated his emphasis on the tight linkages between finance capital and large corporations but also underscored the powerful and continuing influence of rural institutions, like the country town, on American life. More, Absentee Ownership supplemented familiar observations about industrial integration and business sabotage of production with new insights into the growing and fundamental importance of salesmanship and media to the functions and dysfunctions of the business system. Many economists thus naturally highlight the theory of business and credit finance as the most valuable portion of Veblen’s contribution (Ganley, 2004; O’Hara, 1993; Raines and Leathers, 1992; Sweezy, 1957).

Veblen himself rated his most valuable study as The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), a book that provided his most well-developed theoretical and methodological statement. This volume provides the closest thing to an outline of Veblen’s theoretical framework: the core ideas of instinct, institution, habit, workmanship and technology that explain human social action, both humanity’s adaptation to changing material and cultural environments and the barbaric institutions that distort such adaptability. Proponents of the importance of Veblen’s methodological standpoint of evolutionary naturalism quite reasonably stress that Veblen’s significance stems precisely from this, his most sustained and systematic effort to synthesize Charles Darwin and social evolution, though the earlier essays on The Presuppositions of Economic Science, I, II, III (1919, 82–179) and Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science (1919, 56–81) are equally important constitutive elements of Veblen’s theory.

The methodological and epistemological aspects of Veblen’s thinking are doubtless major contributions to contemporary versions of institutionalism. But Veblen never pondered method for its own sake. He thought about and used his method for a reason. His larger project, after all, focused on understanding the genesis of specific institutions and habitual patterns—the leisure class, for example—or later the state system and war. Though Veblen believed that Marx’s theory of the grinding impoverishment of labor was wrong, he also suggested that mature capitalism persuaded people to punish themselves, by laboring on well beyond the point of satisfying their organic economic needs (Veblen, 1899, 111; Plotkin, 2014). In later books and essays, Veblen popularized these insights, writing in a more direct, satiric and less opaque style on urgent political themes: war and peace, economic crisis, the possibilities for a more rational economic order. In a series of books such as Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace (1917), The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919a), and culminating in Absentee Ownership: The Case of America (1923), Veblen scorned the business system, high finance and the nation-state for their economic irrationality and stagnation, for their duplicity, fraud and moral hypocrisy and, above all, for their war making.For those who see Veblen’s contribution primarily as a critic of contemporary political economy, such later works—along with Veblen’s criticism of American universities, The Higher Learning in America (1918)—provide indispensible adjuncts to the highly charged critical value of his method. In these works, as well as in the caustic bite of essays written much earlier, one can see why some scholars rate Veblen as an insightful critic of power politics (Edgell, 2012; Leathers, 1989; Plotkin and Tilman, 2011).

For these reasons, Veblen resists condensation of his theory to any singular formula. His characteristic moves and shifts of institutional perspective repel such reduction. What looks like a preoccupation with consumption in one place becomes in later work a focus on the business and financial systems and even later a concern with the modern state, war and peace. If anything binds these subjects together it is Veblen’s consistent curiosity, his endless fascination with evolving forms of industry and technology, institution and habit, predation and exploit, each considered from moving institutional vantage points. Just as Veblen insisted that we understand the fluid relationship between perspective and focus, his own intellectual gaze was mobile and unfixed. It was contingent and changing. It oscillated, depending on the specific interest that guided his questioning. As he once explained it, The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed changes (1899, 9). And Veblen’s own interests did change, from consumption to production to psychology and later still to politics and war: and yet throughout there is the essential continuity of his evolutionary approach.

Veblen displayed many virtues as a scholar, but he harbored his share of intellectual sins too. His writings are uneven in rigor; the applications of evolutionary science are not always consistent or lucid; the writing, for all its wit and bite, is frequently cumbersome and repetitive; and too often Veblen dangled nuggets of profound insight without bothering to adequately clarify their theoretical foundations. Veblen is neither as systematic as Marx nor as empirically precise as Weber. For these less flattering reasons too he is among the most elusive of theorists. But he produced much more than a jumble and confusion of separate studies. In his own highly original way, Veblen could, like Muhammad Ali, often seem to dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee. But, alas, he can also leave us befuddled and puzzled.

The contributors to the present volume are attentive to these and related conceptual difficulties, and they want us to be too. Though their essays have salient things to say about Veblen the sociologist, each also speaks to aspects of Veblen’s broader intellectual reach, including epistemological issues at the center of his theory as well as its application to contemporary political-economic issues. Problems, ambiguities and gaps in Veblen lend a shared focus to these essays. The contributors challenge themselves to illuminate and to unravel aspects of Veblen’s elusiveness, helping in the process to clarify aspects of his thought that deserve more attention and critique.

For purposes of clarity and focus, I have divided the contributions into two sections. Other arrangements of the work are surely possible and just as reasonable. My rationale reflects the fact that certain themes recur throughout: especially those of action, causation and situation. Thus the articles in Part I explore questions and implications of methodology, epistemology and ontology, the themes of action and causation, method and value. In their chapters, for example, Erkki Kilpinen and William Waller, the former a sociologist and the latter an economist, speak to a major controversy in Veblen scholarship: the relation of instinct theory to Veblen’s institutionalism and theory of action.As Russell H. and Sylvia Erickson Bartley point out in their contribution, Veblen’s higher education at Carlton, John Hopkins, Yale and Cornell taught him to probe the grounds of knowledge claims, to reflect upon foundational matters of knowledge, causation and action. But Veblen was not always as clear as he might have been about the fundamentals of his own thought. There is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about the building blocks of his theory.

Veblen believed that a chief mistake of both classical and neoclassical streams of modern economic thought is their unquestioned reliance on a utilitarian, hedonistic calculus. People are conceived here as one-dimensional pleasure-pain calculators, narrowly rational actors, whose behavior reflects an invariant and binary economic psychology. For orthodoxy, conventional and changing elements of institution, habit and culture become natural, stable and eternal, in a word, given, because given institutions that comprise the fluid context and channeling course of action, such as government, the credit system, property rights, salesmanship and advertising, are unceremoniously dispelled from theoretical inquiry. ⁴ What is left is a spinning human nucleus in quest of gratification, Veblen’s famous homogeneous globule of desire. In sum, mainstream thought explains economic conduct only insofar as may be construed in rationalistic, teleological terms of calculation and choice (Veblen, 1909, 239).

Veblen’s orientation to action was, as Kilpinen explains, radically different. First, instead of stability, Veblen insisted upon process ontology. He saw life in all its phases and dimensions as moving, always changing. Throughout his voluminous writings, Veblen examined this process of change as a slow modification of institution and habit. Each of his books has in common just this effort to elucidate patterns, effects and tendencies of institutional change and social evolution. Most important, as Kilpinen shows, ever-changing institutional forms mirror the perpetual dynamism of human agency. In Veblen’s words, human conduct is subject to the sequence of cause and effect, by force of such elements as habituation and conventional requirements (1909, 237). But as Kilpinen explains, such action is never the mere direct result of exogenous influences. From this observation, he draws the following conclusion, as logical as it is remarkable: Veblen is a unique theorist of action in that he has seen that human action does not, in fact, need any determinants at all. Action connotes not only what we do but also explains who we are as beings. We live by acting, and in so many different ways that cannot be reduced to a utilitarian calculus, especially so since what may count as pleasure or pain is hardly fixed but is influenced by culture, institution and habit. Perception and feeling are themselves profoundly social.

Kilpinen’s reading of Veblen’s concept of action helps explain his controversial understanding of Veblen’s instinct theory. For Kilpinen, Veblen intended his references to instincts, such as the proclivity to workmanship, not to mean a biological cause in any immediate psychological sense. Rather Veblen’s usage is rhetorical: it serves to answer the conventional economic presumption that labor is a sacrifice or cost, a source of pain, a deformed action that yields neither gratification nor satisfaction. Such a view is nonsensical, for Veblen. Human beings must live by the action of their labor or work; hence, human industrial activity is necessarily continuous, habitual action, much, if not all of it, productive. In this way, the dynamic of action becomes, for Kilpinen, a frame for grasping the role of something as basic to Veblen as the instinct of workmanship.

William Waller’s chapter looks at Veblen’s instinct theory through the other end of the looking glass. He presses Veblen’s various discussions of the subject to see how far they can be associated with the recent reintroduction of instinct theory into evolutionary biology. Waller agrees with Kilpinen in one crucial way. Veblen was not a biological determinist, for he never claimed that his instinct theory explained behavior as automatic response. Far from it: Veblen plainly distinguished tropismatic or simple reflex action from deep-seated psychological proclivities or instincts. These do not directly cause action. Rather, instincts further the life of the individual agent or the species by assigning the purposes to be achieved. Where intelligence intercedes, action is reflective, not automatic. Thus Veblen insisted, in an oft-quoted remark, it is a distinctive mark of mankind that the working out of the instinctive proclivities of the race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by other animals (Veblen, 1914, 5–6). How instinct, intelligence, purpose, habit, institution and evolution come together, however, is more than a little ambiguous. Much ink has been spilled to explain it. Unfortunately, as Waller observes, too many Institutionalists prefer to sidestep the problem. But he understandably insists that the issue of ontology, the ambiguities in Veblen’s understanding of what exactly the shapes human proclivity to act, has to be faced. Like Kilpinen, but with a different outcome, Waller urges Veblen scholars to dig into this problem.

In that probing spirit, Waller is skeptical of what he deems excessively cultural readings of Veblen. Such interpretations slight the fact that Veblen rated the association of instincts and intelligence as a distinguishing feature of human nature. As Waller puts it, the culture all the way down approach is perfectly fine, until it isn’t. Waller wants us to take instinct theory seriously, not as Kilpinen’s rhetorical gesture but as Veblen’s attempt to trace culture, habit, institution and adaptation down to its materialist roots, in our biology. He guides us through an informative account of influences on Veblen’s thinking about instinct and offers textual exegesis of the latter’s discussion of instincts in a number of key texts. Furnishing a considered taxonomy of the main instincts as Veblen variously posited them, Waller skillfully clarifies tensions and inconsistencies in those texts. He then revealingly suggests connections between Veblen’s ideas and recent developments in evolutionary biology, especially in regard to the idea of adaptation. Waller concludes with a healthy dose of skepticism about whether and to what extent these extremely complicated biological-cultural connections can yet be understood. In his words, Modern evolutionary psychology offers us the opportunity to restore Veblen’s instincts in some form to a place in casual explanations in institutional analysis, thereby reconnecting cultural analysis to a biological component to behavior.

The key qualifiers here are opportunity and in some form. Whether, or to what extent, evolutionary psychology can finally contribute to a more exacting understanding of the linkage between instinctive proclivities and human action and culture remain open questions. What is less debatable is the evolutionary naturalistic outlook that informs the question itself as well as Veblen’s broad perspective on social life.

For Rick Tilman and Kohl Glau, an appreciation of this perspective is indispensible to understanding Veblen. This claim drives their spirited and sharp-toned criticism of recent efforts by Catholic scholars to find common ground between Veblen and their religious moral and social teaching. To be sure, Tilman and Glau welcome political cooperation and coalition among like-minded advocates of social justice and equality. As far as public policy is concerned, Catholic liberals and critically minded institutional economists share many economic justice goals. In spirit, their point echoes a comparable idea expressed more than a century ago by Friedrich Engels: differences of a purely theoretical nature […] can be discussed very well theoretically without disturbing their common action in any way (quoted in Rosenberg, 1965, 5).

But differences of a […] theoretical nature should not be overlooked either. Here is the nub of their objection. Australian scholars Andrew Hodge and Alan Duhs argue that ``nstitutionalists working in the tradition of Veblen, John Dewey and John R. Commons ought to revisit their lax philosophical and epistemological principles. Better that they should adopt the surer Catholic moral position. Tilman and Glau pointedly reject this argument in two ways. First, they note that serious Catholic scholars have understandably repudiated any philosophical marriage with Veblen. Citing the work of Lev Dobrianski and Christopher Shannon, they recount the vigorous spiritual exception some Catholics take to the thoroughly secular principles of evolutionary naturalism. Veblen’s refusal to look to divine law—or to any extrahuman source whatsoever—for an understanding of human moral judgment is unacceptable to such religious thinkers. Rejection of divinely based natural law must, for most Catholic scholars, produce one of two bad outcomes. Either proponents of evolutionary naturalism must abandon well-grounded moral certainty for mindless value relativism or they are left to proffer weak, internally inconsistent and muddled arguments for their values: Veblen’s vague and shifty instinct theory, for example.

Tilman and Glau reject this critique. On the one hand, they argue that Veblen’s materialism and instinct theory, supplemented by the ideas of other like-minded thinkers, such as Dewey, do offer a reasoned secular alternative to a faith-based foundation for morals.On the other hand, they also recognize where critics such as Dobrianski and Shannon are coming from. They accept that Veblen’s naturalistic approach enrages fervent believers in the church’s doctrine of absolute moral truth. Tillman and Glau do not soft-pedal the difference: they acknowledge it is fundamental. As Veblen himself put it, In the light of modern science the principles of Christian morality […] must […] be taken simply as prevalent habits of thought, with no consideration given to their ‘intrinsic merit’ or ‘eternal validity’ (1910, 202).

Tilman and Glau insist that it makes little sense to try and square a circle, to reconcile outlooks whose assumptions are so plainly contradictory. Evolutionary naturalism rests on what is finally a materialistic analysis of human behavior. Veblen sees no hand of God at work in human affairs. What humans do, for Veblen, reflects an enormously intricate tissue of fundamentally human gifts, patterns and limitations: the species’s biological inheritance, its capacities to adapt to its environment broadly understood, the variety of institutions humans create, the whole big range, scope and variation of human habit and practice. Geoffrey Hodgson, who has written widely and influentially on the importance of Veblen’s Darwinism, makes the crucial point:

Veblen’s contribution was to bring Darwin into the economic arena. This means much more than biological analogies […] it was a new philosophical system, offering a framework of explanation for all complex systems involving entities that compete for resources. Consequently it was possible to generalize the core Darwinian principles of variation, inheritance and selection, and to apply them to social phenomena. In the century and a half since Darwin’s ideas […] appeared, no adequate alternative framework has been devised to explain such phenomena. (Hodgson, 2012, 287; italics in original)

Consistent with Hodgson’s point, Tilman and Glau argue that Veblen’s novel philosophical system was no mere adaptation of old ways of thinking to new problems; it involved considerably more than small shifts in outlook. It offered a boldly materialist, naturalistic alternative theory of the evolving human experience, one rooted firmly in the possibility of human beings coming to know themselves not through faith but through rigorous application of intelligence. In short, Veblen’s ontology and his values come without benefit of theology. Between the two claims there is no path toward a middle way.

Veblen’s epistemology clashes with faith. But the distance between the substance of Veblen’s morals and those of Christian religious teaching is really not so great at all. Veblen’s parents, after all, raised him as a Lutheran, and they imparted a muscular ethical sensibility to all their children, Thorstein not excepted. It is hardly shocking to find that Veblen held that certain Christian values, such as brotherly love and nonresistance and renunciation of violence—values that he warmly embraced—have secular foundations (Veblen, 1910).

In their chapter, the Bartleys probe the biographical underpinnings of Veblen’s metaphysical and value orientation, including his exposure to religious teaching. Adding to the accomplishment of their important earlier essay on Veblen’s physical world, the Bartleys here scrupulously probe the influence of his higher education, particularly at Carlton College and Yale (Bartley and Bartley, 2012). Among their most striking findings is the degree to which Carleton in Veblen’s day encouraged not opposition between religion and science but the quest for common ground. Carleton was a religiously founded institution, but its attitude toward enlightenment and scientific pursuit was anything but defensive or inhibitive. The college was open to science. It welcomed and encouraged its students to familiarize themselves with emerging scientific and technological developments. The Bartleys thus demonstrate a fundamental inaccuracy in Dorfman’s description of Carleton as a religiously sanctioned backwater of American learning, a place that reinforced and deepened Veblen’s sense of alienation and bitterness. They reveal a robust, wide-ranging modern curriculum and a faculty vigorous in its effort to expand, not shutter, students’ minds. Indeed, Veblen’s ability to win entrance to such prestigious graduate programs as Johns Hopkins, Yale and later Cornell would be pretty inexplicable if all he had was a second-rate education that left him oblivious to the achievements of contemporary intellectual life. Veblen read voraciously, but he was no autodidact.

In fascinating and stimulating ways, the Bartleys’ work on Carlton’s curriculum contrasts with Stjepan Mestrovic’s chapter on Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America (1918). Mestrovic credits Veblen with being well ahead of his time. The book’s critique of the business-like expansion of American higher education presciently foreshadowed today’s main drift. But Mestrovic also sees a disappointing contradiction in Veblen’s analysis, a problem that he insists badly needs correction and amendment. Veblen’s claim that the higher learning be reserved for elite scholarly adepts, for specialists engaged in advanced research and graduate education only, implied a professionalization or institutionalization—an excessive limiting, for Mestrovic—of the very idle curiosity that Veblen otherwise argued was an essential human trait. In effect, for Mestrovic, Veblen’s The Higher Learning made unjustifiably elitist what he elsewhere argued was generically human.

This position, he contends, leads Veblen to devalue lower schools and undergraduate education. As a result, Mestrovic accuses Veblen of unduly neglecting the excitement generated by first-rate teachers in the lower schools, teachers whose greatest contribution is precisely to stimulate budding idle curiosity. Mestrovic’s question is sensible: where are scholars and their idle curiosity supposed to come from, if not first galvanized and tutored by exposure to superior undergraduate and lower school teachers? To be consistent with his premises, Veblen must not confine the love of intellectual pursuit to elite domains but encourage it at all levels of learning. In this sense, Mestrovic proposes an even more thoroughgoing and complete Veblenian critique of education than Veblen provided. This indictment shames all schools and teachers—at whatever level—that inhibit lively curiosity.

There is certainly much in Veblen’s book on universities to sustain Mestrovic’s point. Indeed, one might add that Veblen’s endorsement of specialized research institutes as an alterative to business-directed universities anticipated the rise of today’s think tanks and nonuniversity-based research institutions. Should Veblen have also seen how deeply politicized such institutions might become? This would be unfair, and Mestrovic does not indict Veblen for such failure. But his critique does take reasonable aim at a genuine problem. Veblen’s preoccupation with the separation of research and teaching suggests the risk that follows from amplifying research at the expense of teaching.

At the same time, the Bartleys’ research, along with Veblen’s own apparent fondness for his time at Carlton, suggest that he did value undergraduate education. Revealingly, when Carleton asked its famous alumnus for a financial contribution to its building fund, Veblen replied firmly in the negative. His refusal did not reflect contempt for his time there, just the opposite in fact. Encouraging the college’s excessive growth would, Veblen charged, contaminate Carlton’s undergraduate mission. Indeed, as the Bartleys revealingly note, in a letter to the publisher of The Higher Learning, Veblen bitterly complained that the endeavor to make Carleton a big college or a pseudo-university [was] a deadly mistake.

Such evidence does not undermine Mestrovic’s chief criticism: whatever he may have thought about Carleton, in The Higher Learning Veblen overstated the virtues and distinctiveness of graduate work at the expense of a more rounded theory of education. But Veblen cannot be faulted for one thing: he clearly anticipated the contamination of higher education by universities bent on business-like expansion. It is just this predatory pursuit, with significant implications for politics past and present, that focus the essays of Part II.

John Kelly’s quest to find in Veblen sources for a new anthropology of capitalism prepares the way for some of the chief concerns tapped in the essays that follow. Two themes in particular stand out. First, Kelly urges us to think in post-Orientalist ways about the colonial and imperial origins of capitalism, to consider the predatory globality of capital as it appeared long before the age of contemporary globalization. Next, Kelly wants to build out from Veblen’s critique of finance capitalism to clarify a view of how critical realist politics might help shape progressive possibilities for change. The final three essays in the volume speak to these issues. Ahmed Öncü’s insightful application and adjustment of Veblen’s ideas about the leisure class to fit the peculiar social structure of the Ottoman Empire resembles both Kelly’s critique of Orientalist and Eurocentric approaches and his emphasis on the long varied global history of capitalism. It also eloquently signals how Veblen’s thought might be applied in social contexts outside the main Euro-American cases that he studied.My own contribution and that of Ross Mitchell delve into aspects of Veblen’s ideas about democratic political change from below.

Öncü poses a question that has long bedeviled scholarship on the Ottoman Empire: why did it lag behind much of Europe in its development of capitalism? To answer this question, Öncü applies an informed and pliable reading of Veblen’s institutionalism, particularly its emphasis on the ambiguous