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Clarence AyresAmerican economist
Date of Birth: 06.05.1891
Country:  USA |
Content:
- Clarence Edwin Ayres: A Texas School Institutional Economist
- Academic Career
- Economic Philosophy
- Later Years and Legacy
Clarence Edwin Ayres: A Texas School Institutional Economist
Early Life and EducationClarence Edwin Ayres was born on May 6, 1891, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a Baptist minister. He graduated from Brown University in 1912 and earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1917.
Academic Career
From 1917 to 1920, Ayres taught at the University of Chicago. He then joined Amherst College, where he taught until 1923. After a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Ayres became an editor of the liberal magazine New Republic, a position he held until 1927.
In 1927, Ayres joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until his retirement in 1968. During his time at Amherst College, he had notable students such as Talcott Parsons, who became the founder of modern theoretical sociology, and Charles Wright Mills, who explored topics like elite theory and sociological methodology.
Economic Philosophy
Ayres is known as an "institutionalist economist." He developed an economic philosophy informed by the works of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. From Veblen, he adopted the idea of a struggle within capitalist society, a Darwinian contest between technology and ceremonial institutions. Veblen proposed an analytical dichotomy between "instrumental" and "ceremonial" aspects of culture. Ayres adopted the term "institutional" in place of "ceremonial" while not wholly discarding the latter.
From Dewey, Ayres drew upon the concept of "instrumentalism." In particular, he adopted Dewey's theory of valuation, which he used to criticize the notion of the dualism of philosophy. Ayres's attacks on dualism and "ultimate values" were a major factor in his student T. Parsons's eventual rejection of his ideas.
Later Years and Legacy
Clarence Edwin Ayres died in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 24, 1972. He left behind a significant legacy as a seminal thinker in institutional economics, particularly through his application of Dewey's instrumentalism to economic theory.
