Task+5

Thorstein Veblen is the celebrated and ubiquitously recognized founding father of institutional economics. Simultaneously, he has been studied and documented as one of the chief intellectual personages of the Progressive Era. Hence, the main objective of this thesis is to analyze Veblen’s //oeuvre,// taking its social context as an instrument at the forefront of understanding the structure of his proposed theoretical system of political economy. Specifically, the central argument is that his post-Darwinian political economy, based on a radical refusal of teleology and on the concepts of instincts and institutions, could be seen as a reflection of some basic ideological ideas in vogue among the progressive movement during the last years of the nineteenth century. To root Veblen's system of political economy firmly in the Progressive Era, this thesis recurred to the suggestions of the Scottish Strong Programme of Sociology of Science.

The essential idea brought from the Strong Programme is that the structure of scientific theories can be seen as a crystallization of the social ideas amply present in some historical context. In particular, Strong Programme authors advocate the existence of a causal link between the apparently purely intellectual structures of scientific theories and the social, mainly political, thought of the context where theories were created. David Bloor ([1976], 1997) asserts in the founding document of the Strong Programme, his book //Knowledge and Social Imagery//, that it is almost inevitable to think based on the ideologies discursive structure present in the epoch when a scientist invents an innovative theoretical system. The omnipresence of ideological ideas in everyday discourse is responsible for this transplantion of thinking structures from the social realm to the scientific. Thus, unavoidable as it is, Veblen’s post-Darwinian system of political economy was born conspicuously marked by the thinking structure of the progressive era.

First and foremost, the thesis tries to establish Veblen’s drastic repudiation of teleology in economic thinking as a reflection of the ideological interchange that had occurred between the conservative and the progressive sides since the Gilded Age, which became widely upheld in Progressive Era. Envisaging the origins of the reformist American thought, represented in Veblen’s time by the progressives, in egalitarian and liberal Jeffersonian ideals, it could be argued that the last decades of the nineteenth century were the period when reformist zeal turned to pleading for government intervention to restrain the menace of big business. The age old but indispensable classic work of Richard Hofstadter (1956), //The Age of Reform//, identified the growth of this ideological bias with a masterly hand. Meanwhile, elitist thinking, which could be taken as rooted in aristocratic Hamiltonian conservative ideals, seized the //laissez faire// doctrine as its economic gospel. The thesis interprets this interchange as a means inversion between the two ideological tendencies to reach its secular long political ends, the conservative legitimization of an elite ruling the nation and the reformist or progressive claim for a more egalitarian and democratic society.