The Metaphysical Club

Louis Menand

Veblen's view of the hedonistic calculus was that it was founded on "a faulty conception of human nature," picturing a person as "a homegeneous globule of desire of happiness" played upon the external forces. Like most academic opponents of Social Darwinism, Veblen did not reject Darwinism; he only thought that by reading Darwin in the light of classical economic theory, Spencer and his American epigones had missed the point. Real ecolutionary economics, Veblen thought, required a picture of human beings not as passive reactors to stimuli, but as actors for ends. And not all our ends can be expressed in the language of profit and loss. "In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the substance of an individual's conscious life," as he put it in The Theory of the Leisure Class, "the economic interest does not lie isolated and distinct."

Menand provides an interesting, accessible map of the development of thought in the United States from just before the Civil War through the turn of the century up to right before WWI. Any time I read a history of philosophy, I am always somewhat startled how strongly the evolution of thinking influences what I imagine are my own, private and individually determined beliefs. Usually the most uncomfortable aspect of this realization is not so much finding what I believe determined by and predicated on thoughts thought a hundred years ago, but that the very way I think is greatly influenced by people I have never heard of, and sometimes do not agree with. Though our thoughts may occasionally be our own, the walls within which our minds are allowed to run, are built ages ago and are very difficult to raze.