Formative Years
In 1874, together with his brother Andrew, he enrolled in a program at Carleton College Academy of Northfield for careers in Pastoral Ministry. The focus of the college on religious matters provided Thorstein with a narrow and isolated set of studies, which he broadened by reading the works of David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.
However, it was following the courses of John Bates Clark that he developed an interest for economics (see Forges Davanzati 2006). His relationships with the other students and professors were difficult. This was also due, in part, to his complex and difficult personality.In 1880, one year ahead of time, he successfully graduated with a BA, earning high marks. His dissertation consisted in a critique of Mill in the wake of the philosophical thinking of Hamilton. In 1881, Thorstein enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, along with his brother. Here, he chose philosophy. Among his educators were the historian Henry Brooks Adams, the mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, the philosopher George S. Morris and the economist Richard T. Ely. During this period, Veblen furthered his studies of anthropology, sociology and psychology, which would become fundamental for developing his own research approach. He left Johns Hopkins University in 1882 and transferred to Yale, where he earned a PhD in philosophy in 1884, with a dissertation on “Ethical grounds of a doctrine of retribution”. At Yale, Veblen met William Graham Sumner and Noah Porter and importantly he acquired indepth knowledge of Spencer’s theory. All of these elements contributed to the evolution of his thinking (Tilman 2007: 288).
After a long period of inactivity, he enrolled in 1891 in a post-doctoral course in economics at Cornell University. There he met James Laurence Laughlin who, when Veblen transferred to Chicago in 1892, helped him to get a fellowship and placed him on the editorial board of the Journal of Political Economy.
This is when Veblen published his first article on waste: “The economic theory of woman’s dress” (Veblen 1894). In Chicago he also met Jacques Loeb, a famous evolutionary biologist.In the same period, he wrote book reviews on Karl Marx, Enrico Ferri, Antonio Labriola, Werner Sombart and Gabriel Tarde. He also published some articles that were important to his career, such as “The Beginnings of Ownership” (Veblen 1898). All these articles can be seen, ex post, as progressive steps leading him towards his best-known book: The Theory of Leisure Class (Veblen 1899). In all these papers he criticized the classical and neoclassical economic theory and its idea of immutable economic laws, based on the laws of nature (the term “neoclassical” was probably coined by him (Rutherford 2011: 7, fn 4). Instead, he insisted that the new science of economics should focus on the application of the methodology provided by Darwinian Evolutionism, which defined social phenomena as cumulative processes (Veblen 1898).
Three main concepts define the originality of Veblen’s social theory: instincts, habits of mind and institutions. Instincts are at the basis of his vision of historical change, that is, a continuous comparison between the old institutions and new thinking brought about by new technological data. According to Veblen, in fact, there are social instincts: the instinct of workmanship, parental bent, idle curiosity, which promotes community and social wealth or welfare. However, there are also antisocial instincts: instincts of self-regarding, predatory impulses that destroy aspects of the cultural fabric and intensify individualism. Nevertheless, these instincts are moderated or re-shaped by rational thought and intelligence (Weed 1981: 72).
These instincts combine to create a technical knowledge, which is an endogenous variable to the system. When instincts and technical knowledge are considered together, they develop institutions. Institutions consist in the habits of mind predominant in a society. In these processes, technological knowledge plays a pre-eminent role as engine for cultural change (Veblen 1898). There is a need to identify the mental attitudes prevalent in a society in order to understand their interactions with the societal environment and relate them back to economic analysis. For instance, it is imperative that modern science studies the mental attitudes of the businessmen (Vianello 1961: 226). For this approach, Veblen is considered a founding father of American institutionalism (see Rutherford 2011).