The Communication Theory of Thorstein Veblen

Methodological individualism characteristics of neoclassicism, imposes a highly circumscribed notion of information and communication on analyses of human interaction. One recognizes the centrality of communication to economic processes, and therefore eschewed the methodological individualism of the dominant economics discourse, was Thorstein Veblen. For Max Lerner, Veblen was a man living in a shell formed by long years of alienation and hurt, and perhaps also by the glimpses of terror he had when he probed into the nature of institutions and the course of history. In Veblen&s;s view, the mainstream economics of his day incorrectly proposed an "immutably given", hedonistic, essentially "passive and substantially inert" human nature a most grievous error in his opinion, as this robbed economics of dynamic potential. In Veblen&s;s schema, social history has consisted of three major eras: peaceful savagery, accounting for "by far the greater portion of the life-history of mankind": predatory barbarism and civilization , or industry .