INTRODUCTION

At the end of the nineteenth century, Veblen proclaimed the end of preevolutionary economics. Veblen argued that pre-evolutionary econ-omists were inclined to think that economic events are bound to take a ‘natural’ course towards a putative equilibrium. In this course of events, ‘human nature’ was assumed to be unaltered. Veblen believed that the time was ripe for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline. Instead of postulating ‘teleological’ tendencies in the direction of ‘normal’ equilibrium situations, Veblen urged economists to develop an up to date, evolutionary ‘matterof-fact’ approach. Economists would do better to study unfolding processes in terms of their causes and effects. According to Veblen, the key concept would have to be ‘cumulative causation’: causal processes engender effects that provide the starting point for subsequent causal processes, which in turn generate effects that provide the material for subsequent causal processes, and so on. Veblen argued that:

for the purpose of economic science the process of cumulative change that is to be accounted for is the sequence of change in the methods of doing things-the methods of dealing with the material world.