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Clarence Edwin Ayres was the principal thinker in the Texas school of Institutional Economics, during the middle of the 20th century.
Life
Ayres was born May 6, 1891 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. Ayres died on July 24, 1972 in Alamogordo, New Mexico (Breit and Culbertson 1976: 3-22).
Ideas
Ayres is best known for developing ideas that first appear in the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen: the analytical dichotomy between the "instrumental" and the "ceremonial," or — as Ayres himself would usually phrase it — "technology" and "institutions."
Selected publications
- 1938. The Problem of Economic Order. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
- 1944. The Theory of Economic Progress. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- 1961. Toward a Reasonable Society: The Values of Industrial Civilization. Austin: University of Texas Press.
References
- Breit, William, and William Patton Culbertson, Jr. (1976). Science and Ceremony: The Institutional Economics of C.E. Ayres. Austin: University of Texas Press.
External links
"Clarence Edwin Ayres"