From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clarence Edwin Ayres (May 6, 1891 – July 24,
1972) was the principal thinker in the Texas school of Institutional Economics, during
the middle of the 20th century.
Life
Ayres was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of
a Baptist minister. He
graduated from Brown University in 1912, and received
a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1917. He
taught at Chicago from 1917 until 1920, and then moved on to Amherst
College, in Massachusetts, where he taught until 1923.
Following a year at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, Ayres became associate editor of the New Republic,
where he worked until 1927. In that year, Ayres joined the faculty
at the University of Texas at
Austin, where he remained until his retirement in 1968. One of
Ayres students during Ayres time at Amherst College was Talcott
Parsons, the most famous of all American Sociologists, who
wrote two term-papers for Ayres Philosophy III class. Another
notable student of Ayres was C. Wright Mills. Ayres died on July 24,
1972 in Alamogordo, New Mexico (Breit
and Culbertson 1976: 3-22).
Ideas
Ayres is best known for developing an economic philosophy
stemming from the works of Thorstein Bunde
Veblen. Veblen had proposed an analytical dichotomy between the
"instrumental" and the "ceremonial" aspects of culture. Ayres used
instead the terms "technology" and "institutions" to seat the
concepts in a modern economic context.
Books
by Clarence E. Ayres
- 1917. The Nature of the Relationship between Ethics and
Economics. Dissertation, University of Chicago.
- 1927. Science: The False Messiah. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill.
- 1929. Holier Than Thou: The Way of the Righteous.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
- 1929. Huxley. New York: W. W. Norton.
- 1938. The Problem of Economic Order. New York: Farrar
and Rinehart.
- 1944. The Theory of Economic Progress. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
- 1946. The Divine Right of Capital. Boston: Houghton
Miffin.
- 1952. The Industrial Economy: Its Technological Basis and
Institutional Destiny. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- 1961. Toward a Reasonable Society: The Values of Industrial
Civilization. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- 1962. The Theory of Economic Progress, 2nd ed. New
York: Schocken Books.
References
- Breit, William, and William Patton Culbertson, Jr. (1976).
Science and Ceremony: The Institutional Economics of C.E.
Ayres. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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