ABSTRACT
In his celebrated essay of 1898, Thorstein Veblen criticized classical economics for promoting an impoverished, tautological, or circular relation between facts and theory, a relation that he designated as “ceremonial adequacy” (1898: 382). Once the laws of the normal and of the natural are formulated, “according to a preconception regarding the ends to which, in the nature of things, all things bend” (1898: 382), either the facts corroborate such a concept of normality and the propensity to predefined ends and are thus established as relevant, or they do not, in which case they are discarded as abnormal, marginal, or irrelevant. Veblen’s plea was for the replacement of this normative and illusory adequacy with a real one, the abandonment of the “metaphysics of normality and controlling principles” for the observation of the real economic life process made of real economic actions by real economic agents.
