ABSTRACT
The he necessity of according a central role to typical patterns of motivation in their explanations of the workings of capitalism and the events surrounding the Industrial Revolution was recognized by most of the major social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whether their focus was on production or consumption. In the case of both Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen, for example, certain distinctive motives (or complexes of motives) are identified as lying at the heart of the conduct which in the one case prompted entrepreneurs and workers to adopt modern attitudes toward work and money making, and in the other prompted the newly affluent to engage in the continuous consumption of luxury goods. They were, of course, not alone in this and other theorists of the time also stressed the necessity of understanding the motives which impelled people to engage in economic activities, although the factors which drove individuals to work received far more attention than the impulses considered to lie behind consumption. Not all these theorists consciously made explicit use of the concept of motive, but even those who did not, like Marx (perhaps the most notable exception), can be seen to have encountered the necessity of drafting in other terms, (in his case ‘interests’, ‘ideology’, ‘praxis’ and ‘false consciousness’), to play a similar role in the overall explanatory scheme.1 However, whether they were explicitly stated or merely constituted a taken-forgranted framework for analysis, assumptions about motives can be said to have been an essential part of all theories of capitalism, the market and modern economic life.
