Towards a Materialist Reading of Thorstein Veblen's Notion of (Economic) Institution

Abstract

Thorstein Veblen once considered his work on instincts to be his only important contribution to economic theory. Instincts are the conditions and causes behind the formation of habits of thought, while the latter are the sine qua non elements of institutions. The article poses the question: If Veblenʼs relation instincts-habits of thought-institutions were to be thought of as a formal system, what role would they conceptually occupy? It interprets habits of thought as pure ideas in a Platonist fashion (eidos)—multiplicities thought as Ideas—conceived by Georg Cantorʼs theory of manifolds and philosophically assessed by Alain Badiou positing that “mathematics is ontology.” The article aims: (1) to show how habits of thought, as institutions, abstracted from all content can be thought of as set-theoretic multiplicities; (2) to relate Veblenʼs prime instinct, the instinct of workmanship, in equivalence with set theory’s axiom of the empty set—pointing towards Veblenʼs materialist orientation.