Descendance and Social Genealogies: Toward an Evolutionary Conception of Economic History

Beginning of article

In 1898 Thorstein Veblen published his programmatic article "Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" in which he attacked the proponents of(neo-)classical economics as being "helplessly behind the times" (56). As he put it, these economists still "occupy themselves with repairing a structure and doctrines and maxims resting on natural rights, utilitarianism, and administrative expediency" (57) instead of being evolutionary scientists. Basically, he criticized two crucial elements of mainstream economics as it presented itself during his time: the idea of economic equilibrium as it is incorporated in the notion of a "natural state" of society to which the economy converges and a conception of the individual as hedonistic, self-interested, and rational.

In this paper I use Veblen's fundamental critique to propose a modern interpretation of Veblen's vision of evolutionary thinking in economics, arguing that the use of an evolutionary terminology could bridge the old gap between economic theory and economic history that has caused numerous fundamental disputes about the nature of economics as a discipline caught between the natural sciences and the humanities.

In order to develop a modern interpretation of Veblen's evolutionary paradigm, I first explore different traditions of evolutionary thinking in biology and political philosophy with respect to their impact on contemporary economics. It will become clear that the notion of descendance, especially if compared with the theory of variation and selection, has not found much attention in contemporary economics. However, it appears that Veblen had descendance, or the development of social genealogies, in mind when he proposed his vision of evolutionary economics. In addition, he derived inspiration from the metaphorical use of the notion of descendance as a way to cope with problems of economic development such as cultural and social inertia on the one hand and the explanation of change on the other.

I then outline how the idea of descendance can be translated into a theoretical framework and provide an analytical framework to understand how culture is transmitted from one generation to another and why cultural change can occur in this process. As will become evident, change is a rather rare phenomenon whose frequency depends on social characteristics such as the prevailing level of individualism.

In order to show how such an analytical framework applies to real problems and, even more important, to the framework of a historical approach to economics, the last part of the paper applies the methodological and analytical set of instruments developed in the previous sections to the problem of long-term development in rural Russia and, particularly, the resistance to reforms that occurred during economic transition.

Descendance and Social Genealogies--Key Concepts in Historical Economics?

When Veblen asked "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" he implicitly proposed that economics should follow the guidelines of evolutionary thinking and that economic reasoning should be oriented toward the natural science of biology. This proposition gives rise to the impression that the direction of influence should be from biology to economics. However, as the following review of three traditions in evolutionary thinking shows (see also Hodgson 1993; Den Otter 1996, 86), ideas of biological and societal evolution coevolved.

Biological evolutionary theory rested on the philosophical theory of evolution that dominated discourse in the nineteenth century. Herbert Spencer (Bowler 1983; Gray 1996), one of the outstanding proponents of social philosophy based on evolutionary ideas, argued before the background of a more encompassing theory of society that in the long run humans that are not constrained by the will of the state develop under the influence of competition to a "higher stage" of evolution. As a result of societal pressure humans evolve from an undifferentiated mass regulated by external ethical judgments, among them religious rules, to individuals able to regulate their behavior based on their own moral judgments. Thus, societal pressure causing individual self-improvement will, according to Spencer, bring about greater morality of humankind in general, or, put differently, human progress.

According to Spencer, not only social but also biological systems develop along the principles he described; he not only created the term survival of the fittest but was the first to use the term evolution in a biological context (Young 1992). By contrast, Darwin, whose theory was inspired by these philosophical considerations, avoided the term evolutionary because of the social-philosophical connotation just described. Nevertheless, the term evolution became almost synonymous with the name of Charles Darwin, impressively demonstrating the close ties between social philosophy and biology during the nineteenth century.

The proposition that competition among individuals leads to human improvement reveals two basic assumptions in Spencer's thinking that crucially shaped debate in his time. The first is that change is fostered by competition, i.e., by the selective pressure that results from the struggle among individuals for scarce resources, the central point of Thomas Malthus' theory of population dynamics. Thus, while Spencer rejects state influence as a factor disturbing the natural forces of evolution, his entire argument is based on the idea of social control beyond the power of any individual (Gray 1996). Second, Spencer's specific notion of selection is supplemented by a mechanism of directed variation: individuals consciously change their behavior as a reaction to selective pressures. This assumption allows Spencer to conclude that individual change and human evolution have a tendency toward "moral improvement."

The mechanism of directed variation is usually associated with the name Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. However, Lamarck provided another and less well-known but path-breaking contribution to evolutionary biology--the theory of descendance (Young 1992, 89ff). This theory was one answer to the question raised by the results of paleontological research of what happened to species that existed in the past and can no longer be found today. The common assumption, based on the conviction that all species were created by God as immutable creatures, was that those species that had disappeared were extinct. Lamarck, by contrast, concluded that they were not extinct but that species continuously evolved and changed their appearance. Thus, there are genealogies of species that can be traced back by paleontological research. Within the theory of descendance, however, classification based on the theory behind the genealogies is what is important, not the mere collection of facts. Classification is a form of abstraction and necess arily has to be based on a theory that justifies the way objects and organisms are classified.

Seen in this perspective, the main achievement of Charles Darwin (Bowler 1983, 151ff) was not to develop the idea of natural selection but to link the notion of descendance with a specific variation-selection paradigm. This paradigm combines a notion of selection due to competition among organisms with a theory of variation by blind mutation, providing one theoretical justification of genealogies in biology [1] and giving empirical evidence for this theory. It was later developments in biology, especially the rise of modem genetics, which convincingly showed that the variation-selection mechanism is the most substantial and convincing theory to explain the development of species. Thus, the biological version of the variation-selection paradigm developed by biologists in the nineteenth century can now be considered a third major tradition in evolutionary thinking. As the review of the three traditions shows, however, it is useful only if taken together with the notion of descendance that provides a conceptual framework for the variation-selection paradigm. Moreover, it is by no means justifiable to reduce biological evolutionary theories to the variation-selection paradigm. Biological evolutionary thinking is much more diverse and comprises the notion of descendance as well as alternative variation-selection mechanisms.

Today, however, it appears that social scientists researching in an evolutionary perspective either continue to work in the tradition of nineteenth century social philosophy [2] or, in an attempt to draw insights from biological theories, reduce the biological theory of evolution to the variation-selection paradigm. In their attempts to apply biological …