Search Results

Heterodox economics presents alternative critical explanations for the driving forces behind capitalism. The chapter examines the distinctive moral reflections expressed by Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Friedrich Hayek. Marx’s historical materialism relies on dialectical reasoning to explain class struggle and economic change. His valuation of human autonomy, as ultimately manifested in communism, drives his moral critique of capitalism. Veblen’s understanding of the complex instincts underlying economic activity lays a path for more extensive incorporation of moral reflections in economics. Yet his evolutionary economics posits no final purpose in human economic activity. Hayek challenges the perfect information assumption of neoclassical economics, finding that competitive markets continually generate new information that creates disequilibrium. His reflections on the origins of moral codes and critique of collectivist planning affirm the superiority of the norm of liberty. The chapter concludes with the vignette “Karl Marx: Can a Materialist Produce a Moral Critique of Capitalism?”

This final chapter sketches a framework that includes interdisciplinary considerations in decisionmaking. First, five different contextsfor behavior, from the family to the global environment, are analyzed with the observation that motivations vary in each. Then an interdisciplinary grid is constructed beginning with Smith’s passions and Veblen’s instincts to form a decision process that allows for a more holistic approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting behavior. The various passions and the instincts are linked with the social institutions that best socialize them. By considering the market, political sphere, civil society, and religion as important in behavior, it is still possible to do discipline-specific work while accounting for interdisciplinary impacts. The chapter concludes with a vignette describing the concerns of Thomas Malthus as a case study with interdisciplinary impacts and questions about long-term energy availability.

This chapter traces the history of the idea of organizational learning back to last quarter of the 19th century. In focuses on George Henry Lewes's concept of the ‘general mind’ and Thorstein Veblen's notion of collective knowledge. Both point out that the social store of custom and tradition is made up of accumulated knowledge. Learning is thus a process of positive feedback between individuals and society. The recent revival of the concept of institutional knowledge is discussed.

In the early twentieth century, American social scientists created a new discourse around the term technology. These scholars, most important Thorstein Veblen, replaced the original meaning of technology as the science of the mechanical arts with a new meaning that denoted the industrial arts in general along with the material means of production. These changes were strongly shaped by borrowings from the German discourse of Technik. Because of this borrowing, technology acquired three layers of meaning: applied science, industrial arts, and technique. Because of its internal contradictions, technology was able to serve as both a reifying concept, concealing human choice and relations of power, and a liberating concept, laying bare these same choices and power relationships. Veblen exemplifies the use of technology as a liberating concept.

This chapter examines the emergence of the modern consumer movement, focusing on three critical social scientists who analyzed the cultural sources of demand and the conditions under which consumers spent: Thorstein Veblen, Wesley Mitchell, and Hazel Kyrk. These critics all argued that consumers assumed very specific class, gender, and cultural characteristics, and that consumption was largely shaped by cultural forces more than economic reasoning.

This chapter begins by tracing the assertions that link the predominance of Jews in critical discourses to Jewish marginality to a 1919 essay by Thorstein Veblen. Veblen does not argue that creativity and innovation thrive on the margins but, rather, that marginal groups like the Jews are better able than their European contemporaries to hold to a position of detachment and alienation from tradition and received wisdom, transforming their marginality into a critical perspective from which they are able to question, as it were, both themselves and the European social and economic systems. Recent critics of Veblen have pointed at his blindness toward the cultural and economic characteristics of Jewish communal life. In their critique, however, they take the disproportionate success of American Jews as their prime measure, supplanting Veblen's intellectual value with monetary value. From this perspective, Jews are no longer marginal but, on the contrary, central to the ever-expanding social order of capital.

This chapter examines the American preoccupation with money. While there was little concern in the United States for the central themes of classical economics or for the Marxian and other forms of criticism against it, there was an intense discussion of various practical economic topics such as tariffs, monopolies, and questions relating to money. The chapter first considers the debate over tariffs and tariff protection in nineteenth-century America involving figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Henry Carey before discussing issues pertaining to trade, monopolies, trusts, and competition. In particular, it looks at the Sherman Act and other antitrust legislation. It also analyzes the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer that provided a defense of the classical ideas in the United States. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the contributions of Henry George and Thorstein Veblen to the debate on classical economics.

This chapter looks at the long-term changes in the various ecological zones of the north Aegean that provide the framework within which we can begin to understand the specific, medium-term changes that occurred in the second half of the first millennium bc. The transformation of landscapes as a result of agricultural, pastoral, and mineralogical regimes is both a symptom and a product of conscious economic strategies. Animal husbandry provided traction and transport as well as dietary supplements, while textile manufacture, metallurgy, and ceramic technologies track the complex pattern of intra-regional exchange that made the region a distinctive one in the period under consideration. Thorstein Veblen's conviction that ‘the instinct of workmanship’has been a key driver of cultural and economic production is applied here in the context of east Balkan fashions and material preferences.

Chapter 6 traces Carl Van Doren’s claim in 1921 that Spoon River Anthology founded a literary “Revolt from the Village.” Van Doren argued that Midwestern authors inspired by Masters, such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, formed a literary movement that exposed the hypocritical underside of the United States through a critique of small-town America. The dissemination of this argument can be traced to intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, who popularized Freudian theory as a way to critique bourgeois mores and American capitalism. However, other popular authors, like William Allen White, celebrated Midwestern towns as ideal communities as a counter to these critiques. Thus, in the 1920s, a short-lived culture war arose around rival interpretations of Masters’s portrayal of American small towns.

This chapter defines the self-consciously “progressive” theory of marriage developed by sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, feminist theorists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, political economist Thorstein Veblen, Swedish reformer Ellen Key, mystic socialist Edward Carpenter, sociologist and historian George Eliot Howard, and writer and lecturer Edith Ellis. Inspired by evolutionary theory, these architects of progressive marriage established an influential new view of marriage. They proposed that: 1) the economic arrangement of wage-earning husband and dependent wife corrupted marriage; 2) the legitimacy of a union derives not from external arbiters such as law or religion but rather from personal affection and emotion; 3) compulsory monogamy (which is destructive and false) should give way to voluntary monogamy; 4) divorce should be freely accessible; and 5) sexuality, particularly female sexual satisfaction, cemented and indeed validated marriage. These egalitarian, proto-feminist views coexisted with ideas that now appear regressive. In particular, marriage reformers romanticized “nature” and saw eugenics as central to reform.

As a prelude to the consideration of capitalist and post-capitalist possibilities, this chapter considers the general nature of the production process. After a review of key contributions by economists in this area, it is argued that mechanistic or physical metaphors should be replaced by a richer narrative that derives from modern informational conceptions of evolution, highlighting the role of knowledge. As well as encompassing communication and meaning, this informational metaphor is much more capable of dealing with key institutional features of capitalism, involving law, property and contract. It suggests conclusions different from those of other leading commentators concerning the shortening of working hours and the limits to comprehensive central planning.

The first chapter is inspired by Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory, which approaches hotels as a personal and theoretical conundrum. In this chapter, Brody uses theory to define the parameters of his study and turns to Karl Marx, Henri Lefebvre, and Thorstein Veblen to initiate a larger discussion about design, hotels, and labor. Marx sets the stage for an inquiry into labor and how hotels often obfuscate reality through the veneer of design. Lefebvre was one of the first to consider space as a product of capitalism, which manifests the fantasy of an escape from reality in places like hotels. Veblen spoke to the notion of display and the manners of consumption. Each of these theorists provides insight into hotels as carefully designed and highly orchestrated spaces where workers’ voices are far from paramount.

This chapter places the Confucian tradition in conversation with American Pragmatism in its discussion of an alternative to neoclassical economics advanced by John Dewey and others, including Thorstein Veblen. It first considers the assumptions of institutional economics, which is highly critical of some of the “unquestioned” assumptions of the classical synthesis, such as most versions of “rational choice theory” and subjectivist accounts of “utility.” It then looks at the role of Veblen, Dewey, and others in articulating institutionalism in economic theory before turning to Dewey's and Veblen's critique of the neoclassical argument, along with the current discourse on democracy and economic development in Confucian societies. It also examines Dewey's and Veblen's alternative, an evolutionary economic theory that takes into account the history and present tendencies of the institutions that are instrumental to the formation of individuals and communities. In particular, it looks at Dewey's call for a new kind of Confucianism that would better express the profoundest values of the Chinese people as a culture of thought and intellectual influence.

This chapter explores the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on ancient economies, and seeks to apply recent models and concepts to the north Aegean area. Twentieth-century historians of antiquity have followed their nineteenth-century forebears in emphasizing the close connection between the social and the economic. The connection is explored in terms of market relations, focusing particularly on the demand for markets, whether among Xenophon's ‘Cyrean’ mercenaries, trying to get across north-west Asia Minor and serving in south-eastern Thrace; or in terms of the regulations for selling or purchasing slaves and pack animals at Abdera. The demand for particular commodities was driven by social expectations which, in the northern Aegean, were led by the high-ranking followers and associates of the ruling dynasties. Evidence within the north Aegean region suggests a different set of social emphases from the impressions given by Athenian drama and forensic oratory.

This chapter outlines the collective biography of six agrarian intellectuals who were behind the New Deal: Henry A. Wallace, M. L. Wilson, Howard R. Tolley, L. C. Gray, Carl C. Taylor, and Bushrod W. Allin. Growing up in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, all six were raised as farm boys with deep-seated faith in Protestantism. Years later, they pursued formal education in the University of Wisconsin under the instructorship of Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, two of the reigning scholars in the fields of radical-reformism and institutional economics. The chapter describes their careers in the agricultural sector, highlighting the formation of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This bureau became a pivotal cog in establishing the New Deal as it laid down the foundations of the policy.

Avoiding devastation of the human habitat is arguably the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and high inequality greatly impairs successfully addressing this threat. In societies in which fluid social mobility is believed possible, inequality encourages households to seek social certification and status through consumption. Rising inequality strengthens this dynamic. The institutions and behavior generated by the belief that ever-greater consumption brings ever-greater well-being reduce the potential for people to achieve social status and self-respect through more environmentally friendly domains such as democratized work and community. Inequality impedes responses aimed at reducing environmental damage by augmenting the political power of the wealthy, whose interests would be most harmed by measures to protect the environment. The wealthy benefit from pollution because their far greater consumption is made less expensive and their assets yield higher profits. They are also better able to shield themselves from the negative consequences of environmental degradation.

This chapter charts the foundations of the subfield by taking the reader on a tour of key thinkers in political economy from the eighteenth century onwards. The breakaway of political economy and political science from economics is analysed, and the most central tenets of the field’s intellectual heritage are laid out in an accessible format. The twentieth century witnessed a number of non-orthodox contributions to the field, including from Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, and Karl Polanyi. The synthetic account afforded here weaves together the important submissions made to present the trajectory Comparative Political Economy has taken. This and the following chapter offer brief summaries in textboxes and discussion questions for classroom use.

This chapter considers two examples of contemporary conspicuous consumption, the giant bronze statue in Senegal and the proposed resurrection of the Colossus of Rhodes in Greece, to illustrate the puzzling paradox that stands at the heart of this book: the need to explain the logic through which questionable expenditure can become a source of prestige. These examples also echo many of Thorstein Veblen's original insights. The chapter reiterates the importance of prestige and discusses the four dimensions of conspicuous consumption: conspicuousness, cost, hierarchy, and cycles of status symbols. It also considers the rationalist approach to conspicuous consumption and how viewing the world through a Veblenian lens paints a provocative picture of international relations. It concludes by suggesting directions for future research on conspicuous consumption.

Chapter 4 begins to accumulate evidence of the inability of so- called rational- choice theories, which maintain that individuals pursue individual economic interest, to account for such non-utilitarian behaviors as sacrifice. It reinterprets such behaviors as exceptions to the mundane economic order. Drawing on, among other theories, Georges Bataille’s use of sacrifice as an expression of sovereignty, it is argued that such deviations from utility, which may take the alternative forms of either excessive consumption (festivals, potlatches, and the like) or abstention from the same, often signify the independence from need and labor that links the king to the ascetic. The hierarchy and division of labor in which both the ruler and the mendicant find their place is connected with the rise of storage economies, in which surplus goods allow both wastage as a display of symbolic capital or “conspicuous consumption,” and the support of nonproducing members of the community. Expressions of sovereign independence from the mundane economy tacitly acknowledge this economy as a precondition.