The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (Anthem Companions to Sociology) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783082798 ISBN 13: 9781783082797

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2017

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"The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen" offers a collection of original essays by leading scholars in the field of Veblen studies. Contributions span a wide range of Veblen's concerns, with a special emphasis on Veblen's significance for contemporary debates about epistemology, social evolution, values, higher education, capitalist development and politics.

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Sidney Plotkin is professor of political science and Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair of Social Sciences at Vassar College, USA. He received his PhD in political science from City University of New York. Plotkin has written extensively on issues of land use, political power and community action, resulting in numerous articles and two books, Keep Out: The Struggle for Land Use Control (1987) and Private Interest, Public Spending (1994). More recently, his attention has turned to the work of Thorstein Veblen, about whom he has published many articles, and, with Rick Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen (2011). Plotkin has served as president of the International Thorstein Veblen Association.

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The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblena

By Sidney Plotkin

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2017 Sidney Plotkin editorial matter and selection; individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-279-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction: Thorstein Veblen's Elusive Project Sidney Plotkin, 1, 
Part I. METHOD, PHILOSOPHY AND VALUES, 
Chapter One The Instinct of Workmanship and Other Philosophical Concepts in Thorstein Veblen's Methodology Erkki Kilpinen, 21, 
Chapter Two Reconsidering Thorstein Veblen's Use of Instincts William Waller, 39, 
Chapter Three Roman Catholic Critics of Thorstein Veblen and Institutional Economists Rick Tilman and Kohl Glau, 69, 
Chapter Four The Metaphysical World of Thorstein Veblen: Of and Beyond the Here and Now Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley, 101, 
Chapter Five Veblen's Position on Education Analyzed and Reformulated Stjepan G. Mestrovic, 129, 
Part II. CAPITALISM, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND POLITICS, 
Chapter Six Reigniting the Anthropology of Capitalism: Returning to Veblen, after Postmodernism, after Postcoloniality John D. Kelly, 151, 
Chapter Seven On the Social Origin of the Leisure Class in Turkey: For a Veblenian Turn in the Marxian Research Program of Turkish Studies Ahmet Oncu, 189, 
Chapter Eight Veblen's Localism and Its Ambiguities Sidney Plotkin, 213, 
Chapter Nine Learning from Veblen's Masterless Man for Grassroots Democratic Change Ross E. Mitchell, 237, 
List of Contributors, 257, 
Index, 261, 

CHAPTER 1

THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP AND OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS IN THORSTEIN VEBLEN'S METHODOLOGY

Erkki Kilpinen

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before. Thorstein Veblen

If it is at all true that Thorstein Veblen is "still misunderstood but more important now than ever," as Robert Frank has recently asserted (2012), this has implications for Veblen scholarship. Veblen was an economist by calling, and Ken McCormick (2006) has explicated some of his central economic tenets, by putting them "in plain English," as his title nicely tells. In Veblen's time, and in his own thinking, "economics" had a wider connotation than it has today, so that his work needs to be assessed also from wider viewpoints, and Geoffrey Hodgson and Rick Tilman have produced many informative studies that contextualize his thinking. However, the explicative task is not yet over. There is still work to be done, in making Veblen's work more accessible to a wider audience, and in showing just how it may make good sense. For this task, Veblen himself used an apt term, the "preconceptions" in different theories, which he strived to make explicit, while picking apart other economists' doctrines (see in particular 1899–1900).

Preconceptions can be empirical, such as those that a scholar adopts from other disciplines, outside his or her own expertise. Veblen often liked to refer to biology, psychology, or anthropology as support for his economic conclusions. Besides this, a scholar often follows some philosophical preconceptions are usually more tacit than straight borrowings from empirical science. According to Karl Popper's famous dictum, everything we say or do reflects some philosophy, and the question is only whether we realize this or not. This may not always be literally true, but I agree that philosophical preconceptions play a considerable role outside philosophy proper, particularly in the human sciences. In this chapter I attempt to unravel some philosophical and other preconceptions that Veblen relied on in his theorizing, and which, it seems to me, have not so far received all the attention that they deserve.

What the World Is Like

To say that philosophical issues bear on empirical research is not to say anything new, but the order of those issues has not always been sufficiently considered. Philosophers often treat epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, as the most basic of their tasks, and empirical scientists have followed suit, when philosophical issues have busied them, particularly in periods of scientific crises. I am one of those who do not take epistemology as foundational philosophy — though I do grant its great importance, whatever postmodernists might say. The idea that epistemology could provide a basic viewpoint namely rests on a tacit presupposition, on one about ontology. Ontology is a (philosophical rather than empirical) theory (or preconception) about what the world is like. What we can know about the world depends on our assumptions about what it is like. The idea that we without further ado might begin from epistemic questions rests on the ontological assumption that the world is more or less static, so that we can approach it, and search for knowledge about it, at our own leisure. If we cannot take this for granted, we instead have to consider first the world itself. Its nonstatic consideration is known in philosophy as process ontology. And what gives me the right to raise these issues here is the fact that Veblen's ontological assumptions were of the process kind. In Tilman's apt characterization (1996: 167), "In Veblen's process-oriented Darwinian analysis, the only constant is change."

Veblen's ontology has been discussed before. Hodgson deals with it in his tour de force, The Evolution of Institutional Economics (2004). My interpretation of Veblen's ontology is slightly different, although we do draw some shared conclusions. Hodgson does a service in introducing, or perhaps reintroducing, an important concept to social analysis, namely the concept of emergence. "Emergent properties are novel features that arise when elements come into combination, where such properties are not found in those elements on their own," he explains (2004: 10). The classic example about water as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (H2O) is a case in point, but those two elements can also be combined to make hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), which, unlike water, is not wholesome for a living being to ingest, and is highly flammable. The mode of combination thus plays a role as well. The ontologically interpreted emergence concept is a fine idea. For example, it is the organizing principle in a recent account (Deacon 2012) about how mind may have emerged from matter, and how human consciousness and culture have emerged thereupon. However, the problem is that it was not Veblen's ontology.

Hodgson does not make such a claim either; rather, his point is that Veblen missed the boat of emergentist philosophy, though the idea itself was close to his own evolutionist interests. The final manifesto of this philosophy, Emergent Evolution, by Conwy Lloyd Morgan, came out only in 1923, when Veblen's career was practically over. This leads Hodgson (2004: 194) to conclude that "Veblen's lack of an explicit and developed concept of emergence further compounded the problem [of elaborating a theory of institutional evolution] and facilitated his explanatory regresses from institutions to instincts." The idea about an "instinct of workmanship," with which we deal below, is a case of such regress, in Hodgson's opinion.

However, as there are opinions redolent of emergentism in Veblen's correspondence, Hodgson (2004: 135) toys with the idea that he might have attended one of those lectures that Morgan delivered (in 1895–96) in various places in the United States, Chicago included, or he might have heard about them secondhand. In those lectures Morgan was turning toward an emergentist view, although his full-blown theory was finished only decades later. However, there is no evidence about contact between Morgan and Veblen, as Hodgson himself frankly admits.

Morgan's name and some of his ideas were familiar in the circle of Chicago pragmatists, the context in which Hodgson and I situate Veblen. Veblen's philosopher colleague G. H. Mead published a review (1895), not quite without reservations, on Morgan's psychological textbook, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. Later, Mead wholeheartedly accepted Morgan's explicit theory of emergence and drew on it in his own work, but that was during the time when Mead and Veblen were not colleagues any more. However, one need not indulge in any speculation about Veblen's adherence to process ontology He relied on it while criticizing mainstream economics. I shall go into those criticisms after a brief characterization of the process-ontological position.

According to its leading spokesman today, philosopher Nicholas Rescher, the tenor of this ontology is that "the supposed predominance and permanence of 'things' in nature is at best a useful fiction and at worst a misleading delusion" (1996: 28). To give predominance to "things" easily leads one to miss the fact that "storms and heat waves are every bit as real as dogs and oranges," as Rescher adds elsewhere (2000: 4). This statement is actually an understatement. Storms and heat waves apparently are more real than dogs and oranges, because they can affect the fate of dogs or oranges, but the opposite is not possible.

Moreover, it seems that process ontology does the same explanatory job that multi-layered emergence ontology does, according to Morgan and Hodgson. The latter quotes and paraphrases an important passage in Morgan's 1896 work, Habit and Instinct, where Morgan posed for himself the question, if human beings have evolved only slightly, in genetic terms, during the existence of the species, how then is possible the evolution that human society has undergone during the last millennium or so? Morgan's answer to his own question was as follows:

This is that evolution has been transferred from the organism to the environment. There must be increment somewhere, otherwise evolution is impossible. In social evolution on this view, the increment is by storage in the social environment to which each new generation adapts itself, [...] It is not perhaps so obvious that this transference of evolution from the individual to the environment may leave the faculty of the race at a standstill, while the achievements of the race are progressing by leaps and bounds. (As quoted by Hodgson 2004: 136; the source of emphasis not specified.)

This resolves a dilemma that has puzzled some people, due to the fact (or assumption, opinions differ) that the human physiological-cum-psychical makeup supposedly has had insufficient time to evolve biologically during the existence of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, we need not conclude that human thinking processes have remained just the same. As Hodgson (ibid.) elaborates the above quotation, "There is no evidence that the human brain and human mental capacities have changed significantly in well over 30,000 years of human evolution. This fact has to be reconciled with the appearance and more rapid development of human civilization in the last few thousand years." It can be reconciled if we notice that evolution has been transferred from the organism to the environment, as Morgan said. Humans have remained more or less the same, but their environment has changed dramatically, and all evolution takes place in terms of interaction between the living organism and its environment.

But if that is the case, it turns out that this is just the same answer that is forthcoming from process-ontological premises. Emergence "transfers evolution from the individual to the environment," as we have just seen. Process ontology gives the same answer, — nay, not quite, it actually makes the same point better. It makes it better, because no "transfer" is needed here, as the environment is supposed to be evolving all the time, according to its process interpretation. Process ontology thus is the more embracive position, emergence ontology can be specified as its subcase, and sometimes this specification is useful. Some people maintain that an explicit process view is essential if one wants to be a consistent evolutionist. The idea of change needs to hold for the entire world but with the important difference that physical things (crystals, for example) "evolve by virtue of what they are, physically, whereas living organisms evolve by virtue of what they do, goal-directedly," as explains philosopher and cognitive scientist Radu Bogdan (1994: 22). Biological evolution is about doers, not beings. Here I perceive ideas reminiscent of Veblen's position, so that it thus is high time to see what conclusions he drew on the basis of his processontological assumptions.

Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?

The above title is familiar in Veblen scholarship. It originally headed his first major methodological article (1898a). The question remained present also further on in his methodological work, though not this explicitly. The answer that Veblen gave to his own question is not as familiar as the question itself. He begins his article by saying that "Any evolutionary science [...] is a theory of a process, of an unfolding sequence" (2011: 144; 1898a). But just any unfolding sequence does not yet make a process, as Veblen remarks specifically later on, about John Stuart Mill's economic thinking: "He is busied with dynamic sequences, but he persistently confines himself to static terms" (2011: 233; 1899–1900). In order to escape from the confines of static terms, one needs to realize that a process is intrinsically continuous and yields cumulative effects. Veblen maintains that in all successful disciplines "inquiry now looks consistently to the life process, and aims to explain it in terms of cumulative causation" (2011: 150; 1898a). Here a characteristic expression of his, "cumulative causation," makes its first explicit appearance. A classic example (mine, not Veblen's) of cumulative causation may be taken from the Arabian Nights, and it tells about the proverbial feather that eventually breaks a camel's back. Though individual additions to the load are negligible, their accumulated effect eventually leads to a sudden, dramatic change. My interpretation thus is that, for this once, Veblen's pet term "evolutionary" does not refer so much to biological evolution but to the process presupposition underlying it. Namely, he returns to the above theme further on, in the ensuing trilogy of articles, "The Preconceptions of Economic Science, I-III" (1899–1900). There he notes about his colleagues that "Economists of the present day are commonly evolutionists, in a general way" (2011: 241; 1899–1900). In a general way they are, in the way that they have no quarrel with evolutionism in biology, but they do not think the matter through to its eventual conclusions, as Veblen goes on to specify. He adds that the prime postulate of evolutionary science, the preconception constantly underlying the inquiry, is the notion of a cumulative causal sequence; and writers on economics are in the habit of recognizing that the phenomena with which they are occupied are subject to such a law of development. But the economists have not worked out or hit upon a method by which the inquiry in economics may consistently be conducted under the guidance of this postulate. (2011: 242; 1899–1900; emphasis added)

Here is the sore point in existing mainstream economics. Its representatives have not thought the matter through to the conclusion that a process is to be treated qua process, not as related to some purported end state (macroeconomic equilibrium, for example), toward which it may seem to be tending. It may in fact be so tending, but in gazing at the purported end state one's attention drifts away from the inherent dynamics of the process itself. In Veblen's words,

The movement, the process of economic life, is not overlooked [in most economics], and it may even be said that it is not neglected. The concrete subject matter of the science is, of course, the process of economic life, — this is unavoidably the case. [...] but the aim of [such] work is [...] the outcome of the process under discussion rather than a theory of the process as such. The process is rated in terms of the equilibrium to which it tends or should tend, not conversely. [...] In this lies its characteristic difference from the later evolutionary sciences. (Veblen 2011: 235; 1899–1900)

The possible equilibrium should be rated in terms of the process, not the other way round. This is Veblen's point, and this is the difference that he finds between economics and genuine evolutionary sciences. Genuine evolutionary processes have no telos, that is, they are not guided toward anything outside them, and in Veblen's opinion the same principle should hold also in the treatment of economic phenomena. Economic literature actually does talk about "economic processes," but without a sufficiently clear understanding of what processes are. Veblen notes about Alfred Marshall's economics that there is in it "a sense of swift and smooth movement and interaction of parts," and that is as it should be, but the final step remains lacking. In Marshall, the economic process "is the movement of a consummately conceived and self-balanced mechanism, not that of a cumulative unfolding process," Veblen assesses (2011: 240; 1899–1900), and the latter missing point is the crucial point.

And this opens for us Veblen's answer to his own original question. Economics is not an evolutionary science because it does not treat economic processes qua processes, but prefers to look outside them, to the supposed end states toward which they appear to be tending. This is Veblen's diagnosis of his science. However, his suggestion for its possible cure is also an important issue.

Veblen's suggestion for the cure is familiar to most Veblen scholars. It is as laconic as it is audacious, not to say provocative, and it says that "Economic action must be the subject-matter of the science if the science is to fall into line as an evolutionary science" (2011: 152; 1898a).

Veblen cannot mean that economists are unfamiliar with the theme of action, because economic action has always been the subject matter of the discipline, per definitionem. Just for the sake of pedantry, we may note how the aforementioned Marshall begins his magnum opus (1890) by saying, "Political Economy or Economics is a study of man's actions in the ordinary business of life." We must rule out the possibility that Veblen somehow might be unaware of this. Accordingly, his point is that economic action is not what economists have traditionally taken it to be! Before I go on to explicate what Veblen takes it to be, I point out that his process ontology plays a role here as well. Our action-conception is radically

different, depending on whether we suppose action to take place in a steady and predictable world, or in an unsteady process world, a "precarious and perilous world," as John Dewey sometimes called it ((1929) 1958: 42). Action is a simple affair only in a neutral or benign environment (cf. Sterelny 2003). In an unsteady (or perhaps hostile) environment it is a demanding project. The pertinence of the process assumption, in this respect, has not gone quite unnoticed by Veblen scholars. Murray G. Murphey (1988: 137) put his finger on it, as he explained Veblen's position to be that, in their doings, "men respond to exigencies of their environment which constantly change. Thus old habits of belief are challenged by new data resulting from the changed situation in which men act, and they must constantly readjust their beliefs to conform to the dynamic reality they confront." In other words, Murphey suggests that Veblen had a fallibilistic conception of action, and I share this conclusion. A fallibilistic conception is the natural conclusion, if you accept process-ontological premises. However, Veblen's theory of action is so important a theme that it needs an introduction of its own.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783082798
• ISBN 13: 9781783082797
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 286
• Herausgeber: Plotkin Sidney
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• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar