Habits of Thought: Veblen's Dynamics of Instinct and Institution

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) sought to align economics with modern scientific thinking by recasting it as an evolutionary theory of the process of cultural development that unfolds in response to changing material and social conditions. Central to this program was his conception of the interplay between the instincts that define human nature and the institutions that give force to inherited ideas. This short paper characterizes the innately human propensities that find expression as communities struggle to survive in the physical environment, and describes how, in Veblen’s view, those instincts shape ways of thinking, or institutions, which prove in turn to be efficient factors of selection. In “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Veblen said that economic change “is always in the last resort a change in habits of thought.”