Abstract
As we know, Joseph Alois Schumpeter is one of the greatest economists of all times, while Thorstein Veblen is an economist and sociologist who made seminal contributions to the social sciences. Pierre Bourdieu, meanwhile, is one of the most famous structural sociologists, who has consistently worked on economic dynamics. These three scholars have laid the foundations of a socioeconomic perspective. However, several important aspects of their works remain less widely discussed, or even inadequately explored in a comparative manner. Of course, investigating the origins of their ideas in evolutionary and institutional economics and re-evaluating comparatively the influences that shaped their works is quite useful for promoting dialogue between Economics and Sociology. Within this framework, this chapter focuses on the conceptual relationship between Schumpeter, Veblen, and Bourdieu. Evolution and Change shape the economic life in their respective works and, in such a framework a central point of their analyses is the interdependence between the cultural, social, and economic spheres. Furthermore, an economic sociology is built around the concept of habit formation. The three great authors’ systemic views focus on the various institutions and other aspects of cultural, social, and economic life, where habits are formed and cover diverse fields and notions such as Consumption, Preferences, Art, Knowledge, Banking, and even Capitalism. For instance, all three social scientists acknowledged the fact that the internal dynamics of capitalism introduce structural instabilities into the economic system. Also, they recognized that research and knowledge development is a collective social process. However, from a methodological perspective, their main emphasis is on the emerging dynamic evolution of habits, which is perceived as the interruption of already existing social norms and the conflict between routine and change. Several differences between Schumpeter, Veblen, and Bourdieu are observed and analysed and ideas for future research are presented.
The chapter is coauthored by Panayotis G. Michaelides, & Theofanis Papageorgiou, previously published as: Bögenhold, D., Panayotis G. Michaelides, & Theofanis Papageorgiou (2016). Schumpeter, Veblen and Bourdieu on Institutions and the Formation of Habits, Munich REPEC Working Paper: Munich. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74585/8/MPRA_paper_74585.pdf
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, the theoretical threads that tie evolutionary and institutional thinking together may be said to have been drawn from Marxism. For instance, in relation to Veblen and Marx, there has been a longstanding controversy regarding the relationship between their theories. Walling (1905), for instance, emphasized the Marxian character of Veblen’s thought, even though the majority of writers may seem to conclude that “Veblen was not an American Marxist” (Corey, 1937, p. 168). On the other hand, Schumpeter too was called a “bourgeois Marx” by his famous teacher Eugene von Boehm-Bawerk. Of course, Bourdieu was a prominent structuralist Marxist, pronouncing that “the historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world” (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 742).
- 2.
It is clear that Schumpeter was an institutional economist in scope and content but, possibly for reasons of ideology, world view and career, was loathe to admit it. Rather, he was avid in his desire to examine all points of view and to absorb everything that was good in them (Shionoya, 2008, p. 5). According to Shionoya (1997), his ambition was to create a “universal social science”. Veblen understood the evolutionary sciences as being concerned with non-teleological processes of cumulative change and causation. Thus, he succeeded to study the competition of the units as a dynamic process and not as a stationary process (Liagouras, 2009, p. 1048). According to Swedberg (2011, p. 67), Bourdieu’s analysis of the economy was developed over such a long time period, is so rich and goes in so many interesting directions, that we are justified in speaking of Bourdieu’s economic sociologies in plural; while most sociologists know about Bourdieu’s study Distinction (1986) and its analysis of consumption, there is less awareness of the fact that Bourdieu himself, towards the end of his life, said that he had produced three major studies of economic topics. These are: his work in Algeria on “the economy of honour and ‘good faith’” (1950s and 1960s); his study of credit (Bourdieu, 1963); and his study of the economy of singlefamily houses (Bourdieu, 1999).
- 3.
Τhe “substantially animistic” attitude to the nature and direction of temporal sequences reduces economic theory to economic taxonomy: “a body of logically consistent propositions concerning the normal relation of things” (Veblen, 1898a, pp. 383–384).
- 4.
Veblen blamed neo-classical and Austrian economics for their static and teleological methodology postulating equilibrium as the legitimated end of all economic phenomena (Veblen, 1898a, p. 382).
- 5.
Veblen argued that socio-economic evolution must be regarded as a substantial unfolding of life (Veblen, 1897, p. 137), where “It is primarily the social system that would preserve or develop the capacity for change, not significantly the human genotype” (Veblen, 1990 [1914], p. 18). His understanding of the nature of capitalism is perhaps best expressed in the following quotations: “The economic life history of the individual is a cumulative process of adaptation of means to ends that cumulatively change as the process goes on, both the agent and his environment being at any point the outcome of the last process” (Veblen, 1898a, p. 391), emphasizing that “An evolutionary economics must be a theory of cumulative sequence of economic institutions stated in terms of the process itself” (Veblen, 1898a, p. 393).
- 6.
Schumpeter attributed the internal dynamics of capitalism to “a vision of the economic evolution as a distinct process generated by the economic system itself” (Schumpeter, 1911, p. 166). The idea of evolution is not only linked to economic development in isolation, but also to political, social and institutional changes, since the most characteristic purpose of his work was to analyse the evolution of capitalism as a civilization (Shionoya, 2008, p. 1). In fact, “the term evolution comprises all the phenomena that make an evolutionary process non-stationary” (Schumpeter, 1954, p. 965).
- 7.
The use of economic analogies by Bourdieu has often been the object of criticism. For some scholars, it reveals an “economistic” vision of the social world, too much inspired by neoclassical economics. For other scholars, the economic analogy is a kind of mechanical metaphor, inspired by a holistic vision of society. His notions of interest, capital, and so on, are defined by objective class conditions, that is to say, by structural (or global) determinist dimensions. Individuals, especially artists and creators, are denied any singular capacity of creation and rational action corresponding to cognitive autonomous strategies or representations (Lebaron, 2003, p. 552).
- 8.
This is the methodological position that aims to explain all economic phenomena in terms of the characteristics and the behaviour of individuals. We must reduce all collective phenomena to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts of the individual (Popper, 1957, p. 88). The individualist contends that only individuals are responsible actors on the social and historical stage (Agassi, 1960, p. 244). In this context, Schumpeter considered it necessary to make a sharp distinction between political and methodological individualism, as the two concepts have nothing in common. The first refers to the freedom of people to develop themselves and to take part in well-being and to follow practical rules. The second just means that “one starts from the individual in order to describe certain economic relationships” (Schumpeter, 1908, pp. 90–91).
- 9.
Legitimation is not instant and passive, it is the result of a struggle, determining for the dominated, seen a posteriori as hysteresis, for which Bourdieu’s favourite example is the devaluation of educational credentials that, in his view, explain the student protest of May 1968. The result was a divergence between class habitus and the labour market simultaneously in a number of fields, so that their normally disparate temporal rhythms were synchronized, merging into a general crisis, conducted in a singular public time, producing an historical event that suspended common sense. Instead, we have a field of domination governing the struggle between the consecrated incumbents and the new challengers, the avant-garde (Burawoy, 2011, p. 5). The position of a given agent, within the social space, can thus be defined by the positions he occupies in the different fields, that is, in the distribution of the powers that are active within each of them. These are, principally, economic capital (in its different kinds), cultural capital and social capital, as well as symbolic capital, commonly called prestige, reputation, renown, and so on, which is the form in which the different forms of capital are perceived and recognized as legitimate. The categories of perception of the social world are: the product of the internalization and the incorporation of the objective structures of social space. Consequently, they incline agents to accept the social world as it is, to take it for granted, rather than to rebel against it (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 728).
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Bögenhold, D., Michaelides, P.G., Papageorgiou, T. (2021). Schumpeter, Veblen, and Bourdieu on Institutions and the Formation of Habits. In: Neglected Links in Economics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79193-3_12
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