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Abstract
Thorstein Veblen gave special attention to work. He claimed that an instinct of workmanship “is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances … [It] is the court of final appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy.” Although many scholars have examined Veblen’s claim, this article differs by examining his conception of work in light of findings from anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and happiness research. The questions explored are: Why and how did Veblen understand work as instinctual and did his understanding conform to Charles Darwin’s concept of instincts? Is it an instinct that evolved to be pleasurable or to gain respect and status to motivate provisioning? If evidence supports the claim that work did indeed evolve to be pleasurable, and today much of it is not, then its restructuring should be a top social priority. Although Veblen’s understanding of work provides inadequate guidance as to how it should be restructured, he was pathbreaking in insisting that our understanding of this question, and of human behavior and society more generally, must be grounded in the evolutionary biology launched by Darwin. Accordingly, a second aim of this article is to offer support for Veblen’s attempt to do so.
Notes
1 As behavioral economist Robert Frank aptly puts it, “The Darwinian framework is the only scientific framework available for trying to understand why humans and other animals are motivated to behave as they do” (Citation2011, 24).
2 Yet, much of his understanding of human behavior appears to have been drawn from psychologists such as William James, William McDougall, and Jacques Loeb as opposed to a close reading of Darwin’s works (Waller Citation2017, 40).
3 “Impulsive action . . . [that] is in no degree intelligent . . . [is] to be classed as tropismatic” (Veblen Citation1914, 38). Although he viewed instinctive action as intelligent, ironically, he also held that “[u]nder the Darwinian norm it must be held that men’s reasoning is largely controlled by other than logical, intellectual forces” (Veblen Citation1919c, 401).
4 William Waller offers that Veblen’s argument in favor of an instinct of workmanship may have been a negative one, whereby “indolence and wasted effort would be selected against rather than a particular behavioral response to stimuli being selected for” (2017, 57). Interestingly, Veblen noted that “A consistent aversion to whatever activity goes to maintain the life of the species is assuredly found in no other species of animal” (1898, 187).
5 Darwin unfolded his theory of natural selection and took note of sexual selection in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in Citation1859. He then greatly elaborated his concept of sexual selection in 1871 in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Evolutionary biologists Adam Jones and Nicholas Ratterman note how extraordinary this achievement was: “Darwin was correct about almost every topic related to sexual selection that he discussed” (Citation2009, 1007).
6 Although Darwin’s conception of sexual selection does not appear in Veblen’s work, it seems unlikely that he was unaware of it, given the extent to which it received broad attention. Kimberly Hamlin writes that
Even as naturalists debated sexual selection, The Descent of Man and its cornerstone theory reverberated widely throughout American culture. . . . Harper’s announced that one could not open a magazine without reading about it. It appeared on prominent book lists for women’s and girls’ clubs until the turn of the twentieth century, and the New York Times reported that it was among the most popular books checked out of Manhattan public libraries as late as 1895. Nineteenth-century Americans eagerly read The Descent of Man, and left-leaning reformers embraced the concept of female choice. (2014, 153–54)
Rick Tilman suggests that “Edward Bellamy probably influenced [Veblen] more than any other socialist writer” (1996, 29), and Hamlin points out that “The Descent of Man and sexual selection theory, in particular, appealed to left-leaning reformers, including [Charlotte Perkins] Gilman and Bellamy, because female choice promised to not only elevate the status of women but re-generate all of society—present and future—by refocusing attention on natural, as opposed to class-based, indicators of health and fitness and by restoring women’s natural reproductive autonomy” (2014, 173). Given Veblen’s feminist sympathies, why he chose to ignore Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is puzzling. It should be noted that Veblen had both the Origins of Species and The Descent of Man in his library (Barnett Citation2018, 51).
7 Instead, Veblen seemed to see pleasure as a consequence as opposed to motivator. For example, “These native [instinctual] proclivities alone make anything worth while, and out of their working emerge not only the purpose and efficiency of life, but its substantial pleasures and pains as well” (1914, 1).
8 Veblen may have believed so. He wrote of savages living in a “condition of poverty-stricken peace” (1898, 199).
9 Robert Heilbroner chose to reserve the word work to what is performed by unfree labor: “The essence of work is that . . . tasks are carried out in a condition of subordination imposed by the right of some members of society to refuse access to vital resources to others” (Citation1985, 12).
10 This did not escape the notice of Adam Smith: “Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its most advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity” (1776, 100–101). Many other productive activities of early humans such as cooking, woodworking, pottery, knitting, sewing, weaving, and leather work are much later practiced as hobbies. Following World War Two, middle-class men, and sometimes women, living in the new suburbs, built workshops in their basements, spare rooms, or garages, to craft things by hand, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.
11 When many Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially the young, were sensing the conquest of the problem of material scarcity, a strong interest in foraging was awakened. It was stimulated by books, most notably those of Euell Gibbins, and especially his Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962). However, with the private appropriation of the commons, gathering has become extremely restricted.
12 In the United Kingdom, for instance, in a population of 64 million, 27 million partake in “leisure” gardening (Evergreen Garden Care Citation2020).
13 Without explicit biological grounding, some notable social scientists have recognized this self-creation. Karl Marx claimed that man, by “acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature” (Citation1859, 177). Anthropologist V. Gordon Childe titled his now classic work Man Makes Himself (Citation1936). This self-creation process also occurs in the dynamics of sexual selection.
14 Psychologists and happiness researchers Robert Biswas-Diener, Edward Diener, and Maya Tamir report that “the happiest folks all [have] strong social attachments” (Citation2004, 22).
15 Females are, then, far from passively powerless: Because females choose, they direct much male evolution. It was this empowerment of the female that drew the attention of feminists and progressives such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman at the end of the nineteenth century to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection (Hamlin Citation2014, 164).
16 Veblen believed that the selective process that made humans social animals, also made them “substantially” peaceful animals, but that due to a surplus worth fighting for, “a sportsmanlike inclination to warfare is . . . to be found in nearly all modern communities” (1898, 193, 191). Had he read Darwin more carefully, he would have noted Darwin’s assertion: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection . . . [and] the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other; for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species” (Citation1871a, 1:159–160, 85). Further, this group cohesiveness—Veblen’s parental bent—was supported by the fact that heroism in war is sexually rewarded.
17 Frequently, capturing women was a principle aim of war. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss provides a vivid report:
Among the Yanomamö [a contemporary foraging-horticultural people in the Amazon rainforest], there are two key motives that spur men to declare war on another tribe—a desire to capture the wives of other men or a desire to recapture wives that were lost in previous raids . . . It seemed silly to them to risk one’s life for anything other than capturing women. (Citation1994, 219–220)
18 The scientific study of happiness is relatively new. As Biswas-Diener, Diener, and Tamir report, “[o]nly recently, in the last 50 years, have behavioral scientist undertaken a serious empirical examination of happiness. By employing testable hypothesis, longitudinal designs, controlled experimental studies, and multiple measurement methods, researchers have been able to explain aspects of subjective well-being more definitively than the less formal approaches common in the past were equipped to” (Citation2004, 19).
19 Economists Milena Nikolova and Carol Graham report that “work meaningfulness is a eudaimonic dimension of well-being at work . . . [finding] that autonomy, competence, and relatedness explain about 60% of the variation in work meaningfulness perceptions. Meanwhile, extrinsic factors, such as income, benefits, and performance pay, are relatively unimportant for work meaningfulness” (Citation2020, 23).
20 The other four are: to have supportive friends and family, to be reasonably healthy and have treatment available in case of health problems, to have important goals related to ones values, and to have a philosophy or religion that provides guidance, purpose, and meaning to one’s life (Diener and Seligman Citation2004, 25).
21 Premodern state societies typically became as exploitative and unequal as they could possibly be, near or on their “inequality possibility frontier,” a concept developed by economist Branko Milanovic (Citation2016) to designate an extreme at which elites take absolutely all of output except subsistence—what producers need to barely survive and reproduce. To take more would be to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
22 Veblen’s only acknowledgment that machine technology might lower workers’ intelligence is made in a footnote (Citation1904, 313).
23 As opposed to viewing economic inequality as consequent to political inequality, Veblen depicts it as resulting from technological change: “[i]t appears that this uneven distribution of wealth arises out of the technological exigencies of handicraft and of the petty trade which characteristically runs along with the handicraft industry in its early stages. . . . So capitalism emerged from the working of the handicraft system, through the increasing scale and efficiency of technology” (1914, 274, 282). Although this is suggestive of technological determinism, he noted that the “conventions of any given civilisation in their turn react on the state of the industrial arts” (1914, vii).
24 Aristotle, for instance, wrote:
a state with an ideal constitution—a state which has for its members men who are absolutely just and not men who are merely just in relation to some particular standard—cannot have its citizens living the life of mechanics or shopkeepers, which is ignoble and inimical to goodness. Nor can it have them engaged in farming: leisure is a necessity, both for growth in goodness and for the pursuit of political activities. (Citation2000, 1328b–29)
25 Veblen was familiar with Marx’s work and it is curious that he did not build upon or take issue with the fact that Marx had extensively addressed the deskilling of the workforce as the capitalist production process “progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature labour power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children” (Marx Citation1867, I: 697). Marx deepened this discourse by arguing that because workers lack control over the work process, they are impeded from expressing their creativity and sociality in work. Consequently, work is “not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (Citation1844, 74).
26 In terms of evolution, this is what gene-cultural evolution would predict.
27 Kanazawa identifies a “savannah principle,” to stand for the environment in which humans evolved, and claims that “[t]he human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in [this] ancestral environment” (Citation2009, 26), suggesting that humans are poorly adapted to the radically different environment of the contemporary world.
28 The necessary institutional reform for Veblen was the elimination of private property: “[t]he ultimate ground of this struggle to keep up appearance by otherwise unnecessary expenditure, is the institution of private property . . . [and that] [w]ith the abolition of private property, the characteristic of human nature which now finds its exercise in this form of emulation, should logically find exercise in other, perhaps nobler and socially more serviceable, activities” (1919a, 399).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jon D. Wisman
Jon D. Wisman is Professor of Economics at American University, Washington, DC. The following are remarks upon receipt of the 2023 Veblen-Commons Award.