ABSTRACT
The ideas of society and culture as evolving systems emerged from a combination of evolutionary thought and the greatly increasing knowledge of human variation over time and place that became available during the nineteenth century. Thorstein Veblen was the first economic anthropologist, and what makes it so remarkable is that he did not study exotic peoples—it is always easier to see customs when they look foreign and therefore funny—but rather examined his own culture. John R. Commons, who took a different route and a different approach, arrived at some remarkably similar conclusions. An assertion that the institutionalist legacy deriving from Veblen and Commons was drastically different from other economic thought, and that both Veblen and Commons drew relatively little upon other traditions of economic thought is at odds with propositions easily found in the literature. In thinking of Veblen as radical and akin to Karl Marx, the much closer kinship between Veblen and Commons is minimized.
