Charles Camic

Charles Camic, Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will profile the early academic life of economist Thorstein Veblen, one of America’s most innovative social theorists, in order to understand the social processes by which novel ideas emerge and develop. He will examine the culture and intellectual orientation of the institutions where Veblen studied and taught as a young man. Challenging previous biographers who assumed that Veblen must have lacked attachment to the more moderate thinkers of his time in order to establish such heterodox ideas, Camic argues that it was Veblen’s strong ties to scholars in a wide range of disciplines during his formative years that fostered his unconventional, pioneering theories.