Socio-economic evolution and Darwinism in Thorstein Veblen: a critical appraisal

Schumpeter, Commons, and Veblen on Institutions

“…In other words, Veblen conceived of evolutionary sciences as being concerned with nonteleological processes of cumulative change and causation. Thus, he succeeded to study the competition of the units as a dynamic process and not as a stationary process (Liagouras : 2).…”

“…Veblen argued that socioeconomic evolution must be regarded as an unfolding of life (Veblen : 137). According to Liagouras (: 4) he “was the first thinker to introduce to social sciences the idea of human history as an evolving process of change with neither predetermined end, nor a specific pattern of development.” Also, regarding the evolutionary nature of capitalism, he held that an evolutionary economics should be a theory of cumulative sequence of (economic) institutions stated in terms of the process itself (Veblen 1898a: 393).…”

“…Habits of thought could easily be related to an evolutionary process passing through the human being. However, according to Liagouras (: 6), “in the continuous impersonal process of selection, human individuals were subject to natural selection as carriers of concrete habits of thought.”…”

Kenneth Boulding's Theories of Evolutionary Economics and Organizational Change: A Reconstruction

“…He aptly notes that the Veblenian dichotomy, for example, cannot be deduced from the Darwinian population thinking, in spite of Veblen's own endorsement of Darwinism. Rather, the social criticism generated by this dichotomy is predicated on the vision of society at "the macroscopic level of the totality of human history" (Liagouras 2009(Liagouras , 1056) rather than its vision as an ecosystem of interacting populations. Therefore, it does not seem far-fetched to relate the critical connotations of the Veblenian dichotomy to those of the Luhmannian concept of world society which Luhmann sees as having been historically constituted by the regime of functional differentiation.…”

Lost in Translation: WhyGeneralizedDarwinism is a Misleading Strategy for Studying Socioeconomic Evolution

“…But at the same time they hold biology to be the only viable model for social sciences. The present article adheres ideologically to interdisciplinary scholarship in its questioning of the increasingly greater interference of biological reason in the social sciences (for example, Dugger ; Gould ; Fracchia and Lewontin ; Lawson ; Liagouras ; Brown ).…”