Clarence Ayres Memorial Lecture Should Economics Be an Evolutionary Science ? Veblen ’ s Concern and Philosophical Legacy Tony Lawson

“Why is economics not an evolutionary science?” It is now over a hundred years since Thorstein Veblen formulated this question, possibly the most famous of all questions in the history of economics. In an essay acknowledging Veblen as “the founding father and guiding spirit of American institutionalism,” Clarence Ayres concluded that it is the sorts of questions he asked that “reveal the significance of Veblen’s legacy” (1963, 62). But what exactly is the feature of Veblen’s legacy whose significance is revealed by a largely philosophy-of-science question such as this? Despite some recent rather compelling assessments that Veblen’s philosophical contribution is primarily a “deconstructive” project in epistemology, one similar in some ways to that of modern postmodernists (Hogsbergen 1994; Peukert 2001; Samuels 1990, 1998), I want to argue to the contrary that, in matters philosophical at least, Veblen’s primary legacy is (i) a constructive program after all (as traditionalists within institutionalism have mostly maintained) albeit one that is (ii) grounded in ontology (as few institutionalists appear explicitly to have argued). With space here highly restricted I mostly concentrate on defending (i) against recent criticisms, though I do also, and necessarily, touch on (ii).