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Pearson, Heath --- "Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929)" [2005] ELECD 183; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420321

Section: Chapter 59

Section Title: Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929)

Author(s): Pearson, Heath

Number of pages: 6

Extract:

59 Thorstein Veblen (1857­1929)
Heath Pearson


Introduction
Veblen was born to Norwegian immigrant parents in rural Wisconsin; he was
raised there and in Minnesota, and did not become fluent in English until his
late teens. He attended Carleton College (BA in philosophy, 1880), Johns
Hopkins (no degree) and Yale (PhD in economics, 1884). Thereafter he
taught economics at Chicago, Stanford, Missouri and the New School for
Social Research. In addition to his scholarly endeavours, he served as editor
of the Journal of Political Economy and occasionally contributed to such
popular periodicals as the Dial. Veblen's greatest posthumous fame is as the
progenitor of the American school of `institutional economics', better known
to outsiders as `old institutionalism'. This entry will illuminate those aspects
of his thought which bear on the concerns of modern `law and economics',
sometimes termed the `new institutionalism'. First, we shall show that Veblen's
thought was grounded in the same jurisprudential revolution that has issued
in the economic analysis of law. Having established this, succeeding sections
will stress how he took that common impulse in an exotic direction that has
marked him ever since as a pole of heterodoxy.

From natural law to legal realism
Veblen's thought matured in a broader intellectual ferment that predisposed
him to the same style of social thought that has motivated law and economics
ever since. Had he entered university 30 years earlier, Veblen would no doubt
have imbibed a social philosophy grounded in natural law; in other words, ...