Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and the Genesis of Evolutionary Economics

In Western social science from the First World War to the 1970s, biological metaphors were rarely highlighted and the links between the socio-economic and the biotic worlds were denied (Degler, 1991; Hodgson, forthcoming). In contrast, in the late 1880s and early 1900s there was a widespread opinion that social and biological phenomena were closely related in some manner. The view was often voiced that socio-economic phenomena were explicable in purely biological terms. However, even within this orbit, contrasting views prevailed, as they did for example on the issue of whether cooperation or competition were found in nature, or were “natural” to human society. ²