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and pains associated with various actions, and then chose the ones that gave them the most pleasure. To be fair, it should be noted that defenders of this hedonistic approach argued that “pleasure” included mental and spiritual pleasure as well as physical pleasure [Mill, 1961, 195].
The idea that people only react to pleasure and pain struck Veblen as absurd. The neoclassical approach presents people as passive, reactive agents. Veblen believed that a person “is not simply a bundle of desires that are to be saturated … but rather a coherent structure of propensities and habits which seek realization and expression in unfolding activities” [1919, 74]. If there were no pleasure to be had or pain to be avoided, would we really sit still and do nothing at all? Moreover, do people really make the calculations required to maximize utility? Veblen satirized the hedonistic view of human nature in a famous passage that illustrates both his biting wit and the difficulty of reading his prose:
The psychological and anthropological preconceptions of the economists have been those which were accepted by the psychological and social sciences some generations ago. The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-imposed in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears