But most of all, the man gave so much to economics- a new pair of eyes with which to see the world. After Veblen’s savage description of the mores of daily life, the classical picture of society as a well-mannered tea party became increasingly difficult to maintain. His scorn of the old school was bitingly expressed when he once wrote: “A gang of Aleutian Islanders, slushing about in the wrack and surf with rakes and magical incantations for the capture of shellfish, are held… to be engaged on a feat of hedonistic equilibration in rent, wages, and interest,” and just as he ridiculed the classical attempt to resolve the primitive human struggle by fitting it into a fleshless and bloodless framework, so he highlighted the emptiness of trying to understand the actions of modern man in terms which derived from an incomplete and outmoded set of preconceptions. Man, said Veblen, is not to be comprehended in terms of sophisticated “economic laws” in which his innate ferocity and creativity are both smothered under a cloak of rationalization. He is better dealt with in the less flattering but more fundamental vocabulary of the anthropologist or the psychologist: a creature of strong and irrational drives, credulous, untutored, ritualistic. Leave aside the preconceptions of another age, he asked of the economists, and find out why man actually behaves as he does.
From Heilbroner’s, The Worldy Philosophers
I do experience strong and irrational drives. This man fascinates me : )
No comments:
Post a Comment