The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
circulation"[6] or as "the medium of exchange." Money is here discussed
in terms of the end which, "in the normal case," it should work out
according to the given writer's ideal of economic life, rather than in
terms of causal relation.
With later writers especially, this terminology is no doubt to be
commonly taken as a convenient use of metaphor, in which the concept of
normality and propensity to an end has reached an extreme attenuation.
But it is precisely in this use of figurative terms for the formulation
of theory that the classical normality still lives its attenuated life
in modern economics; and it is this facile recourse to inscrutable
figures of speech as the ultimate terms of theory that has saved the
economists from being dragooned into the ranks of modern science. The
metaphors are effective, both in their homiletical use and as a
labor-saving device,--more effective than their user designs them to be.
By their use the theorist is enabled serenely to enjoin himself from
following out an elusive train of causal sequence. He is also enabled,
without misgivings, to construct a theory of such an institution as
money or wages or land-ownership without descending to a consideration
of the living items concerned, except for convenient corroboration of
his normalised scheme of symptoms. By this method the theory of an
institution or a phase of life may be stated in conventionalised terms
of the apparatus whereby life is carried on, the apparatus being
invested with a tendency to an equilibrium at the normal, and the theory
being a formulation of the conditions under which this putative
equilibrium supervenes. In this way we have come into the usufruct of a
cost-of-production theory of value which is pungently reminiscent of the
time when Nature abhorred a vacuum. The ways and means and the
mechanical structure of industry are formulated in a conventionalised
nomenclature, and the observed motions of this mechanical apparatus are
then reduced to a normalised scheme of relations. The scheme so arrived
at is spiritually binding on the behavior of the phenomena contemplated.
With this normalised scheme as a guide, the permutations of a given
segment of the apparatus are worked out according to the values assigned
the several items and features comprised in the calculation; and a
ceremonially consistent formula is constructed to cover that much of the
industrial field. This is the deductive method. The formula is then
tested by comparison with observed permutations, by the polariscopic use
of the "normal case"; and the results arrived at are thus authenticated
by induction. Features of the process that do not lend themselves to
interpretation in the terms of the formula are abnormal cases and are
due to disturbing causes. In all this the agencies or forces causally at
work in the economic life process are neatly avoided. The outcome of the
method, at its best, is a body of logically consistent propositions
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