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

This paper uses Thorstein Veblen's 1898 fundamental critique to propose a modern interpretation of Veblen's vision of evolutionary thinking in economics, arguing that the use of 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, the different traditions of evolutionary thinking in biology and political philosophy with respect to their impact on contemporary economics are explored.