In Thorstein Veblen’s famous essay, Why is Economics not
an
Evolutionary Science, he makes his famous critique of the
“hedonistic” assumptions of “classical economics”.
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...