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Technology Is Not Ancillary: The Dramatic and Prosaic in Economic Theory

In the opening passages of his Theory of Business Enterprise, Thorstein Veblen observed that the modern economy manifested two major characteristics, business and industry. This dichotomy not only characterizes the modern economy, but it also runs deeply through the course of development of economic theory. In many of the storybooks that recount the history of economic thought the impression, whether intended or not, is given that it all came by intellectual immaculate conception from the mind of Adam Smith. But as Guy Routh in his Origin of Economic Ideas insisted, those elemental ideas concerning the virtues of a market economy were well in place at least 200 years before Smith put them together in what became The Wealth of Nations. Others, such as Max Beer in his Early British Economics, made the same point earlier in the last century. Anyone familiar with the pre-Smithian economic literature is surely aware that Thomas Mun was a merchant as were many of those writing early economic tracts including the mercantilist writers. The very designation for their work surely points to their professional origins. And then, of course, following Smith there is the French merchant]. B. Say's bestowal of the merchant imprimatur to Smith's economics. The conventional market economics is a merchant philosophy concerning the social virtue of individual "avarice and greed." It contends that in following personal interest, the merchant works an end not of his intention, the public good. By flailing the mercantilists for what has come to be known as the mercantilist fallacy, Smith was able to create the impression that his was a new brand of economics, virginal in origin. But all the while that Smith flailed the mercantilists, he stood on their