Clarence E. Ayres Article Index for
Clarence E
Website Links For
Clarence
 

Information About

Clarence E. Ayres





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 Massachusets, 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