Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class

By John Patrick Diggins

Fired by Stanford and the University of Chicago but recommended by his peers to the presidency of the American Economic Association, Thorstein Veblen remains a baffling figure in American intellectual history. In part because he was an eccentric who shunned publicity, he has also been one of our most neglected. Veblen is known to the general public only as coiner of the term "conspicuous consumption," and to scholars primarily as one of many social critics of the reform-minded Progressive Era. This important critical biography--originally published as The Bard of Savagery and now appearing in paperback for the first time--attempts both to unravel the riddles that surround his reputation and to assess his varied and important contributions to modern social theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691223315

John Patrick Diggins

John Patrick Diggins was distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the author of numerous books, including On Hallowed Ground, The Proud Decades, The Lost Soul of American Politics, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy.

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THORSTEIN VEBLEN

THORSTEIN VEBLEN

THEORIST OF THE LEISURE CLASS

JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1999 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Diggins, John P.

[Bard of savagery]

Thorstein Veblen : theorist of the leisure class / John Patrick Diggins.

p. cm.

Originally published: The bard of savagery : Thorstein Veblen and modern

social theory. New York : Seabury Press, 1978.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-00655-5 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-691-00654-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Veblen, Thorstein, 1857-1929. 2. Economists—United States—Biography.

3. Social reformers—United States—Biography. 4. Economics—United States—

History. 5. Social history. I. Title.

HB119.V4D46 1999 330′.092—dc21 98-54179

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-0-691-22331-5

To My Mother and the Memory of My Father

CONTENTS

PREFACE: SOCIAL THEORY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE  xi

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION  xvii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS  xxxv

PART ONE: THE MILIEU AND THE MAN  1

CHAPTER ONE

Veblen’s America  3

The Crisis of the Republic  3

The Reform Persuasion  8

The Preeminence of Capitalist Ideology  10

CHAPTER TWO

Enter Veblen: Disturber of the Intellectual Peace  14

The Status of Leisure and the Stigma of Labor  14

The Engineers and the Price System  20

Science and Liberation  26

CHAPTER THREE

The Social Scientist as Stranger  31

The Man Nobody Knows  31

The Satire of His Presence  33

The Intellectual Wanderer  38

PART TWO: THEORY AND HISTORY  41

CHAPTER FOUR

Economics and the Dilemma of Value Theory  43

Bentham or Hegel? Veblen’s Critique of Marx’s Economic Theories  43

The Metaphysics of Normality: Veblen’s Critique of Classical Economics  48

Value Theory and the Eetish of Productivity  52

CHAPTER FIVE

Marx, Veblen, and the Riddle of Alienation  59

Alienation and the Origins of Property  59

The Beginnings of Ownership: The Anthropological Dimension  63

Human Nature and the State of Nature: Veblen versus Hobbes  67

The Contamination of the Instincts  72

The Machine Process and Idle Curiosity  76

CHAPTER SIX

Reification, Animism, Emulation: The Cultural Hegemony of Capitalism  83

Capitalism and Its Discontents: Weber, Marx, Veblen  83

Veblen and the Stages of Historical Development  86

Money, the Mystery of Commodities, and Reification  94

Emulation and the Hegemony of Capitalism  101

Status Deprivation and the Integration of the Working Class  106

CHAPTER SEVEN

Veblen, Weber, and the Spirit of Capitalism  111

Max Weber and the Rise of Capitalism  112

Ben Franklin and John Adams  116

Tocqueville: Wealth and Envy in Jacksonian America  126

Religion, Science, and Rationalization  131

PART THREE: INSIDE THE WHALE 137

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Barbarian Status of Women  139

John Stuart Mill and Veblen: Liberalism and Naturalism  139

From Engels to Lévi-Strauss  145

The Economic Psychology of Women’s Dress  152

Veblen and Charlotte Perkins Gilman  156

Veblen and the New Woman; H. L. Mencken and the Male Counter-Attack  159

Power Demystified  164

CHAPTER NINE

The Tribes of Academe  167

Professor Veblen  167

The Captains of Erudition  170

Bureaucratic Realities  174

Idle Curiosity versus Pragmatism  178

CHAPTER TEN

America and the World  184

World War One and Imperial Germany  184

Peace Without Honor  189

A Soviet of Technicians  194

Social Theory and World Realities  196

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Disciples and Dissenters: Veblen’s Legacy in American Thought and Social Action  208

Truth and Technocracy  208

Perspectives on Veblen from Three Decades  211

Consensus Scholars and Critical Theorists  217

CHAPTER TWELVE

Conclusion: Whither Capitalism?  225

NOTES  231

INDEX  253

PREFACE

SOCIAL THEORY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE

The rich are different from you and me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yes, they have more money

Ernest Hemingway

IN THAT short exchange, which is reported to have taken place between two of America’s greatest modern novelists, we have a key to the entire social theory of Thorstein Veblen. Fitzgerald was fascinated by the rich and by the sociology of wealth. Hemingway could dismiss the charm of money only because he worshipped something even more romantic and more related to Fitzgerald’s imagination than he was aware—the world of will, strength, and conquest. Driven by a compulsion to succeed, both writers were haunted by the shadow of failure. Perhaps only Veblen, both a genius and a failure, could see the connection between Fitzgerald’s fantasy and Hemingway’s masculinity, between the possession of wealth and the enjoyment of status, between money and power, love and glory.

Thorstein Veblen was an intellectual of many roles: ponderous critic of orthodox economic theory, witty castigator of class distinctions, champion of feminism against the barbarian status of women, enfant terrible of the higher learning, theoretician of industrialization and national power, exponent of scientific philosophy and economic anthropology, sociologist of status and anatomist of affluence, literary artist of irony and satire and stylist of playful solemnity. Previous scholarship on Veblen has generally focused on a single aspect of his thought to the neglect of other dimensions. In American intellectual history, for example, Veblen has often been dealt with as one of the chief social critics of the progressive era, a writer whose thoughts are best appreciated in the context of other reform movements such as liberalism and socialism. Although useful, such an interpretation slights Veblen’s aloofness from reform movements, his critique of the theoretical foundations of socialism, and his real doubts about the powerful pragmatic creed that constituted the philosophical core of modern American liberalism.

The very name Veblen evokes various images. Among general readers it recalls the eccentric professor and caustic satirist of status climbing and conspicuous consumption. Among the more informed the name conjures up the theoretician who saw in the ascendancy of the technical and scientific professions a radical hope for social transformation. But these impressions, which derive respectively from The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Engineers and the Price System, have the effect of obscuring rather than illuminating the depth and diversity of Veblen’s unique analysis of modern industrial society On the one hand Veblen emerges as but the mentor of Vance Packard, on the other as merely the precursor of James Burnham or the spiritual ancestor of John Kenneth Galbraith. So regarded, Veblen can easily be relegated to the footnotes of American intellectual history, an author whose works are frequently quoted and seldom read.

Part of the confusion about Veblen’s reputation stems from the ambiguous nature of his own ideological legacy. On the left Marxists admire his critique of capitalism but are piqued by his rejection of Hegel and dialectical materialism; liberals value his attack on big business but are disturbed by his skepticism about historical progress; conservatives rejoice in his exposure of the foibles of mass society but are shocked by his disrespect for the rich and the powerful; and feminists esteem his understanding of the archaic basis of masculine domination but are puzzled by his own relationships with women. Veblen seems to delight everyone and satisfy no one.

I believe that the best way to transcend these ambiguities and to achieve a clearer sense of Veblen’s achievements is to examine his thought in relation primarily to the theories of the two sovereign social thinkers of the age—Karl Marx and Max Weber. It should thus be stressed at the outset that this book has to do with social theory in general, with Veblen serving as the central focus, and Marx, Weber, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Simmel, Sombart, Mead, and others providing occasional comparative perspectives. I believe that this is how Veblen would have liked to be reconsidered, not merely as a technocratic reformer but as a wide-ranging scholar grappling with the same great issues of apprehending social reality that preoccupied other social theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Viewed from this perspective, Veblen was almost alone in refusing to grant capitalism its historical legitimacy. He denied that it represented a progressive force that, whatever its negative features, had to be judged both productive and rational. He insisted, rather, that a large part of capitalist behavior is irrational and essentially hedonistic, an almost atavistic phenomenon reflecting not so much the cool prudence of bourgeois man as the residual habits of primitive societies. Neither Marx nor Weber fully explored the possibility that modern capitalism could be interpreted as an anthropological problem, could be seen, that is, less as a unique historical stage or spirit than as a timeless mentality with roots not only in ancient, preliterate communities but also in the barbaric depths of contemporary man. As a result, both Marx and Weber underestimated the staying power of capitalism and fell short of perceiving the total reality of bourgeois culture. Marx concentrated on the economic forces of production to the exclusion of the sociological pressures of consumption, while Weber stressed the ascetic, as opposed to the acquisitive nature of early capitalism, seeing the emergence of a new ethic rather than the reemergence of an archaic trait. It was precisely this determination to explain the higher by the lower that made Veblen the bane of capitalism and, as Perry Miller so aptly described him, the bard of savagery.¹

Any thorough evaluation of Veblen’s achievements as a social theorist must begin with the recognition that he was the pioneer of the field of economic anthropology.² His criticisms of traditional economic philosophy mainly derived from his conviction that economic theory by itself failed to explain adequately everyday economic behavior. Hence, orthodox economic theory had to give way to a more comprehensive theory of social phenomena, a theory grounded in the data of ethnology and anthropology. Consider, for example, the function of money. In its classical definition money fulfills three roles: it is a medium of exchange, a standard of value, and a store of wealth. Veblen found this definition too rational, based on the psychology of self-interest and economic calculation that characterized the prevailing orthodox assumptions about human behavior. For Veblen the important thing about money is the context in which it circulates, a social-cultural dimension which, once grasped, enables us to see money not primarily as a means of exchange but as an expression of power by means of its display-value. What is ultimately desired, under the name of profit or riches, is essentially power over men and women by those who possess the symbols of wealth. One of Veblen’s many achievements was his demystification of the authority of wealth by exposing the psychological structure of an economic system that runs on noneconomic motives. Even though he failed, perhaps not surprisingly, to drive home this message in an American culture obsessively devoted to the rule of commodities, the magnitude of his accomplishment is suggested by the fact that he was formally writing about economics, actually delving into anthropology, and ultimately making a major contribution to the sociology of human power relations.

To treat Veblen as social theorist requires an expanded definition of the term theory. Veblen himself never bothered to explain what he meant by the term, even when he used it in the title of his most famous book. I use it to refer not to a rigorous methodology, a simple point of view, a program of human liberation, or a theoretical system consisting of logically interrelated propositions subject to empirical refutation or confirmation. I use the term in a way that is bound up with the problem of consciousness. By the turn of the century, a period in which post-Marxist scholars like Weber, Durkheim, and Veblen were formulating their theories, society and consciousness of society had become problematic. It was increasingly felt that society should be explained, not by the notions of those who participate in it, but by the more profound causes which are unperceived by its members. Veblen, like Durkheim and other contemporary sociologists, perceived society as an independent power set over and apart from the individual, a power which endows the mind with concepts that subtly impose their hold as it molds the individual by means of the forms that arise from its inexorable socializing processes. To know society by means of theory was presumably to escape this epistemological circularity in which both the knowing subject and the object of knowledge have been ensnared. Theory, thought Veblen, would enable one to penetrate the underlying processes of society which are hidden from the more ordinary forms of consciousness.

Theory for Veblen, however, meant neither social involvement nor political activism but detachment, self-reflection, and an ironic perspective that seemed to negate everything and affirm nothing. Where Marxists believed that one knows the world by acting upon it and transforming it (praxis), and where liberal pragmatists believed that social truth derived from social experimentation, Veblen held that idle curiosity offered the best hope of overcoming a condition of mind so alienating it is incapable of experiencing its own alienation. Marxists and capitalists alike were committed to changing the world. Veblen remained convinced that what could not be accurately interpreted could not be fundamentally changed. Before we can even begin to talk of overcoming (Aufhebung) alienation and exploitation we need to discover where such phenomena came from in early archaic society. It was this task that constituted the anthropological imperative of social theory.

To appreciate fully Veblen’s contribution to modern consciousness, one must engage in comparative social theory. There are hazards in this genre, not the least of which is the dubious promise of ultimate truth. Comparison, wrote George Santayana, is the expedient of those who cannot reach the heart of the things compared; and no philosophy is more external and egotistical than that which places the essence of a thing in its relation to something else.³ Santayana’s injunction may humble the philosopher; the social theorist and intellectual historian, concerned not with fixed essences or absolute truth but with the dynamic nature of social phenomena, recognize that we can understand social life only as a whole and that each part can be understood only by its relationships. What applies to reality applies to theory. To get at some approximate truth about social phenomena we must engage in comparative analysis. No social theory can be studied in isolation from its competitors, for it is only when theories are allowed to confront one another that we become fully aware of their limitations. This book is essentially an exercise in theoretical confrontations, an approach which is, by the way, entirely compatible with Veblen’s own modes of analysis. More than any other contemporary American thinker, Veblen was a comparative scholar par excellence. His theory involved the determination of certain cultural traits in modern industrial society and the comparison of contemporary social relations with the behavior of archaic men and women in primitive societies. Probing the new data of ethnology and anthropology, Veblen offered fresh perspectives on social reality which merit but have not received systematic examination. I believe that Veblen achieved new and important insights into the nature of society, and the originality of his vision can only be made evident with the accumulation of different perspectives on it. When properly comprehended, Veblen’s insights may, in the end, bring about a reorientation of modern social theory. Like the novelist of manners, he illuminated the deeper meaning of social behavior with imperishable perceptions. With the literary artist he recognized that truth may be approximated by means of satirical technique, by exposing cant and debunking the reigning misconceptions of false consciousness. As a satirist as well as a social theorist, he remains a critical mind upon whose gaze nothing was lost.

A word about the book’s organization. Part One, The Milieu and the Man, seeks to introduce Veblen to the general reader through an elementary discussion of his writings, career, and the general historical context in which he moved. Part Two, Theory and History, plunges into the deeper currents of modern social philosophy: theories of value, alienation, reification, mediation, hegemony, and history, and especially the sociological dynamics of capitalism in the course of American history. Part Three, Inside the Whale, discusses Veblen’s engagement with such contemporary social issues as higher education, the women question, and war and peace. The final chapter, Disciples and Dissenters, deals with Veblen’s legacy in American thought and social action, and the Conclusion, Whither Capitalism? offers a final estimate of the central question Veblen raised: How is unearned wealth and wasteful consumption legitimated in a culture supposedly devoted to the ethic of work and the value of efficiency?

Some of this material has appeared previously in the following journals: Chronicle of Higher Education, History and Theory, The New Republic, and Social Research.

Several scholars were kind enough to read portions of the first draft of the manuscript. For their criticisms and suggestions I wish to thank Lewis Coser, Carl Degler, Anthony Giddens, Robert Heilbroner, Robert Huberty, Christine Hyerman, and Alan Lawson. Again 1 am indebted to my friend Gerald Meaker, who took time out from his own scholarship to give the manuscript a rigorous reading. The editorial suggestions of George Lawler are much appreciated, and so too the biographical information provided by Joseph Dorfman and the recollections of Veblen offered by Lewis Mumford. I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for making possible my residence at Cambridge University where, as a Fellow at Churchill College, I worked on the book and benefitted from my conversations with Maurice Dobb, Moses Finley, Doug Gale, Tony Giddens, Jack Goody, Jack Pole, and Joan Robinson. A special note of thanks is due to David Reisman, who encouraged me to go beyond his own psychoanalytic interpretation of Veblen, doubtless realizing, as we all must, that even the revisers will be revised, not excluding, of course, this one.

Laguna Beach, 1977

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

TODAY, as the twentieth century comes to an end, America finds itself fixated on the fetish of fashion, whether haute couture for the rich or Nike sneakers for the ghetto kid. More than ever Thorstein Veblen’s immortal phrase, conspicuous consumption, has taken hold of a society of affluence and pretense. People of all ages and both sexes want to be told how they should dress for the approval of others. Referring to The Official Preppy Handbook, Henry Fairlie wrote that Veblen would have appreciated the importance of all the Preppy motifs and dress and habits that are described here. Fashion, the art of appearances, continues to adhere to Henry David Thoreaus dictum: Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Veblen carried on in the tradition of American moralists when, ridiculing fashion as wasteful innovation for the sake of reputation, he explained how the wearers clothes combined elegance with ineptitude to display a life apart from useful activity. Human behavior, it seems, conducts itself in 1999 exactly as it did a century earlier in 1899, the year that Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class appeared and placed a mirror before the face of the American people. Did they even begin to understand their follies and fantasies about apparel and its conceits?

Veblen was a serious economist as well as a social satirist. His analysis of the ways in which actual economic activity defies orthodox economic theory may be more relevant than ever, even if his solutions to the problems of modern capitalism remain as irrelevant as ever. One thinks of other economic philosophers as well. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Max Weber are probably, to stretch the imagination, observing us from either the heavenly heights or the hellish depths, and all of these thinkers are shaking their heads, each for a different reason.

Smith would demonstrate to Veblen the way in which the vicissitudes of fashion simply reflect an economy of exchange where people seek to distinguish themselves from one another, and Keynes would try to teach Veblen why consumption could be a positive stimulant to the flow of money. But Marx would try to explain to Smith and Keynes why affluent societies cannot rationally correct the insatiable demand for commodities. Veblen, in turn, would ask Marx why he ever assumed that the working class could rise to revolutionary consciousness, and Weber would ask Veblen why he thought that the engineers could do so and why he assumed that science would be liberating rather than a new form of technological domination. This is intellectual history at its best—a living dialogue with the dead.

Thorstein Veblen may well be described as the first social theorist to give the dismal science of economics long-needed comic relief. After Veblen, the idea of economic man became something other than a creature of rational interests and something less than an agent of social virtue. Against the prevalent interpretations of his day, including the Marxist as well as the conservative neo-classical, Veblen depicted the capitalist market economy as irrational and essentially hedonistic—an atavistic phenomenon that could be grasped not by studying charts and statistics but by probing the behavior of archaic men and women living in primitive, tribal communities. The genius of Veblen lies in his combining an anthropologist’s sensitivity to the noneconomic motives of human behavior with a writer’s sensitivity to the strategy of irony and satire. In recent times, for example, social science has come up with a rational choice theory of economic behavior which contends that human beings act in ways that prudently maximize their interests by trying to earn more and spend less. Why then, Veblen would ask, do people buy expensive cashmere coats when clothes can be made from cardboard?

One need only read The Theory of the Leisure Class for an explanation. People spend lavishly and acquire things to display prowess and superior status and disdain for common labor. In his greatest book, in which he discusses Polynesian customs, Veblen analyzes how such modern behavior reflects the persistence of archaic traits deriving from pre-modern times. Particularly memorable is the scene in which a certain French king, accustomed to having a functionary shift his seat, continued to sit still, close to a fire, observing good form even though the functionary failed to show up to do his duty. The king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery.

Veblen’s best-known work can be read as sardonic social commentary (in this instance the inanities of status and social roles that render rational consumer behavior a quaint fixation of orthodox economic theory). But Veblen could be equally withering in his numerous scholarly papers that appeared in such academic publications as the Journal of American Sociology and the Journal of Political Economy. In these articles, later collected and reprinted in his two most theoretical works, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays and Essays in Our Changing Order, Veblen frequently lets slip a sardonic aside that drives home his point far more effectively than would the traditional mode of scholarly discourse.

Some of these theoretical articles are discussed in my book. But writing the book two decades ago, I failed to take up Veblen’s qualities as a writer. Veblen was as unique a literary artist as he was an economist and, in addition, a sociologist and anthropologist. He wrote by indirection, in a style designed to disguise his own thoughts. His humor could often be deadpan, reminiscent of the comic spirit of writers like Mark Twain. With Veblen, in contrast to Twain, the slow, dense, and repetitive manner of his writing reflects the stolid impassivity of his outlook. But Twain, who grew up to see the typewriter come into existence, as exciting an invention as today’s computer technology, shared Veblen’s faith in the machine process. Veblen’s own writing often partakes of that process in its monotonous beat.

Veblen’s prose style has been the subject of considerable discussion and much debate among social scientists, literary scholars, and even analytic philosophers. The continuing interest in his expository style is a further indication that much of Veblen’s appeal lies in his power as a writer and rhetorician. While his economic ideas have long been assimilated by social scientists, his literary craftsmanship cannot be fully appropriated or imitated. One remains fascinated as well as occasionally frustrated by an overloaded prose that combines ponderous academic solemnity with witty and arresting epigrams, as well as brilliant insights that are often relegated to asides or footnotes.

Veblen’s long, convoluted descriptions can leave one with the sense, as Max Lerner put it, of endlessly chugging polysyllables, as if his sentences were a long string of freight cars rolling on forever. Equally frustrating is Veblen’s masking of his own moral stance behind a coldly objective prose purporting to be scientifically neutral. And some scholars are put off by Veblen’s use of the academic monograph and scholarly treatise to poke fun at the higher learning of the brain merchants of the status quo, professors and captains of erudition.

Above all, it is Veblen’s repetitiveness, his weakness for tautologies and circumlocution, that leaves many readers breathless. H. L. Mencken, Veblen’s ideological nemesis and his most severe literary critic, believed that Veblen’s writings should be excommunicated from the English language:

It is as if the practice of that incredibly obscure and malodorous style were a relentless disease, a sort of progressive intellectual diabetes, a leprosy of the horse sense. Words are flung upon words until all recollection that there must be a meaning in them, a ground and excuse for them, is lost. One wanders in a labyrinth of nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles, most of them swollen and nearly all of them unable to walk. It is difficult to imagine worse English within the limits of intelligible grammar. It is clumsy, affected, opaque, bombastic, windy, empty. It is without grace of distinction and it is often without the most elementary order. The learned professor gets himself enmeshed in his gnarled sentences like a bull trapped by barbed wire, and his efforts to extricate himself are quite as furious and quite as spectacular.

For all his concern about style, Mencken’s essay on Professor Veblen, in his collection Prejudices (1919), was directed more at the substance of his adversary’s thought, especially at Veblen’s satires on capitalist behavior, his defense of women, and his treatment of the rugged American individual as the finest flower of primitive barbarism. Mencken would not allow himself to perceive that Veblen’s ponderous style may have been deliberate, not so much a failure of proportion as an artful attempt to engage the serious feelings of people in order better to expose the silliness of conventional wisdom. In the invisible world of sociology, in which the implications of customs, habits, and values remain hidden from the ordinary reaches of consciousness, what better style could be employed to sensitize human awareness?

It is perhaps facile to suggest that how one responds to Veblen’s style depends upon how one responds to his analysis of modern American society Yet Veblen’s liberal and radical champions do tend to see his prose as further evidence for the dictum that truth is approximated by satiric technique, by unmasking cant and debunking reigning misconceptions. In this enterprise Veblen employed various satiric and ironic literary devices and in the process created some of his own, such as the hapless university president parodied in The Higher Learning in America. Another example is his use of invented phrases that have a cunning twist—such memorable expressions as conspicuous consumption, trained inability, resolute conviviality, pecuniary emulation, imbecile institutions, blameless anility, naive brutality, honorific waste, invidious distinction, gifted with ferocity, and conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.

Veblen’s prose is weighed down with cumbersome sentence structures that often sag from sheer erudition. But his diffuse style is always relieved by a touch of the playful, a casual insight, an ironic twist, or a wicked sense of humor that occasionally rises to epigrammatic brilliance. Plato’s scheme of folly, wrote Veblen in The Higher Learning, which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction and pursuit of knowledge. Despite the criticisms of conservatives like Mencken, and even the reservations of liberal admirers like Lerner and Alfred Kazin, Veblen remains one of the great writers in American social thought. A keen observer of manners and morals, he elevated social science to the level of literary art; and if he tended to conceal his own purposes behind a dense prose style, he also illuminated the deeper meaning of social behavior with enduring perceptions.

In addition to serving as a satirist of social practices, Veblen presents himself as a theoretician who sees in the ascendancy of the technical and scientific professions a radical hope for the social transformation of America. Since such hopes have been far from fulfilled, a too close focus on Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System and Absentee Ownership have the effect of limiting rather than illuminating the many dimensions and depths of his unique analysis of modern industrial society. Just as some commentators regard his study of the leisure class as setting off the later work of Vance Packard on status-seeking, so, too, do they regard his work on the engineers as simply setting the stage for James Burnham’s thesis on the managerial revolution. So regarded, Veblen can easily be relegated to a footnote in American intellectual history, an author whose works are frequently quoted and seldom pondered.

Veblen’s stature seems to have fluctuated according to the moods of various generations, a pattern that indicates that reactions to him have often depended on ones judgment of America. Thus the Greenwich Village left of the World War I era saw him as a valuable intellectual resource for national self-scrutiny, an ally of the young rebels in revolt against tribal customs and the respectability of the starched-collar class. The Old Left of the 1930s regarded Veblen’s surgical analysis of the plunder economics of finance capitalism as presaging Wall Street’s crash of 1929, the year of his death. Although Veblen’s fame had been in eclipse in the era of Calvin Coolidge, he now shines like a star of the first magnitude, observed John Chamberlain in 1931. Several books were written not long after his death, including Joseph Dorfman’s informative biography, Thorstein Veblen and His America. In 1938 The New Republics symposium on Books That Changed Our Minds, had Veblen coming in way ahead of others with 16 mentions, followed by Charles Beard (11), John Dewey (10), Sigmund Freud (9), Oswald Spencer and Alfred North Whitehead (7 each), and V. I. Lenin and 1. A. Richards (6 each). Yet, in the desperate years of the depression, Veblen’s social criticism seemed only to negate everything and affirm nothing. The novelist John Dos Passos, who etched a masterful portrait of Veblen in The Big Money, and who told his friend Edmund Wilson that Veblen’s work is a sort of anthropological footnote to Marx, echoed a complaint of a whole generation of writers when he lamented Veblen’s inability to get his mouth around the essential yes. But in the trilogy USA, which included portraits of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, Veblen received the most sympathetic treatment for his having established a new diagram of social relations in a prose etched in irony, and readers were informed that America had exposed itself to the clear prism of his mind.

After World War II, Veblen’s reputation suffered decline, partly due to the spectacular performance of the American economy in the war and the positive reappraisal of American society in the fifties. Yet his legacy remained vital to Max Lerner, who edited Viking’s The Portable Veblen. During the postwar years intellectual historians like Daniel Aaron, Henry Steele Commager, and Morton White assessed Veblen’s thought in the light of America’s liberal tradition; while the economists Douglass Dowd, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert Heilbroner praised Veblen’s critique of neo-classical orthodoxy, which in recent years has enjoyed a revival in the writings of Milton Friedman; and C. Wright resurrected Veblen as the comic thorn in the side of bourgeois complacency. By no means has there been unanimity. The Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons maintained that Veblen’s social theory was essentially very simple and that a quite adequate comprehension of Veblen’s real contributions could be found in Max Weber’s work. Parsons’s dismissal completely misses Veblen’s and Weber’s profoundly different attitudes toward religion, capitalism, bourgeois culture, the work ethic, and the role of science. Similarly, Daniel Bell claimed that Veblen’s aim, like that of all technoauthoritarians from Saint-Simon to James Burnham, was to become the active political force of a new class capable of overthrowing the existing order. Bell’s argument that Veblen must be ranked on the side of the elitists ignores Veblen’s own maverick personality, which made him incompatible with the demands of any organized movement. Surely a man who sympathized with the Wobblies, scorned academic entrepreneurship, and turned down an offer to become president of the American Economic Association was not simply whoring after power.

What, then, motivated Veblen? Years ago David Riesman tried to answer this question in Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953), a Freudian analysis of the childhood determinants that supposedly influenced Veblen’s antipathy toward class society. Riesman’s suggestive book suffers because at the time few knew anything about Veblen’s family and childhood background. But his book helps us understand why consensus scholars of the fifties were puzzled by Veblen’s hostility to capitalism, and why they were inclined to trace his ideas to individual pathology rather than to social reality. Although Veblen may have had his share of neuroses, not all neurotics shared his insights. Veblen was an idiosyncratic personality, to be sure, but in intellectual history, if not in psychohistory, it is the man’s work, and not his life, that poses the most compelling questions for social philosophy. Yet, before turning to the relevance of his work for today, a few words are in order about his character as a human being.

Mention the name Thorstein Veblen and one inevitably draws a smile. His bizarre scholarly career is legend enough to raise eyebrows in academic circles. What student and professor would not like to know more about a man who could be both a genius and a failure, to say nothing of an inscrutable misfit who made life so frustrating for administrators and so interesting for women? It was the whisper of sexual scandal that cut short Veblen’s career at prestigious universities. Yet almost everything we knew about this aspect of Veblen’s life remained in the realm of rumor and hearsay years ago when I and others wrote books about him. Not only did stories of his erotic conquests seem more fanciful than true, even the man himself escaped our grasp. What was he like?

Until recently almost everything we knew about Veblen derived from Dorfman’s massive biography that appeared more than a half-century ago. Since Veblen had ordered in his will that all his papers be destroyed, nothing seemed to remain of his correspondence, save a few insignificant letters. But Rick Tilman’s diligent research in Thorstein Veblen and His Critics (1992) turned up some interesting material. Dorfman’s book, while a treasure of factual detail, left us with the impression that Veblen was a dry academic who was as aloof as he was evasive, unattached and uncommitted, indifferent to friendship and the joys of life. According to some of his dinner partners. he was also known never to utter a word at the table. Yet, when Dorfman conveyed this impression in his book, Jacob Warshaw, who had taught with Veblen and knew him personally, responded angrily He described Veblen as a man of feeling, capable of passionate outbursts, and by no means concealing either his emotions or his intentions. I never thought of him, wrote Warshaw, as, in his heart, the suave, imperturbable, sphinx-like character who stands out in Dorfman (Tilman, 6-7). Members of Veblen’s family were also upset with Dorfman’s description, which had young Thorstein growing up in an environment of economic deprivation, isolated in a Norwegian enclave in the Midwest. Some scholars cited the alleged deprivation and isolation as the possible cause of Veblen’s bitterness toward capitalism and the easy life of leisure. Yet Veblen’s family was reasonably well off, and Thorstein himself had actually led the life of a loafer on the family farm. Andrew Veblen, Thorstein’s older brother who would go on to become a famous mathematician and colleague of Albert Einstein, also complained of the portrait of a struggling family isolated in the sticks.

Veblen remains such an intriguing figure, an enigma wrapped in contradictions, that we can never know enough about him. Thanks to the thorough research of Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen in their book Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand (1998), we will now have access to numerous family letters and to correspondence Veblen had with students and women companions. It turns out that Veblen was not the inveterate womanizer that we once assumed, the philanderer with whom no husband would dare leave his wife alone in a room. Yet it is also the case that Veblen had more than one affair, and his relations with women remain as perplexing as the man himself.

Veblen was married to Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the President of Carleton College. The romance started with the full rush of love. From the first day he cared for no other, reported a friend. But in 1896, eight years into their marriage, Veblen wrote to his wife, telling her that due to a fondness for another woman, a Wellesley student, he could no longer regard himself as her husband. What Veblen failed to tell his wife was that the other woman was about to marry another man. Strange behavior. Many professors deny having an affair with a student, only to run off with a young coed; not Veblen.

Nevertheless, Ellen had her revenge. After the breakup she was understandably distraught, yet she behaved almost as strangely as her ex-husband. While she worried about her economic situation and asked Veblen for continuing support (which he had generously offered even before it was requested), she also, some years later, gathered together material to send to President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University. In this material she reported that Veblen had become involved with a married woman who had not yet divorced, and she also conveyed her weakness of health and economic insecurity. Eventually Ellen’s complaints about her husband led to his being dismissed from Stanford University. Although this satisfied Ellen’s desire for revenge, one wonders about a wife who expects her husband to support her and at the same time succeeds in getting him fired—and not only from Stanford. Later, President Jordan was to write to the University of Chicago, describing Veblen as one who, though behaving perfectly as a polite and collegial gentleman when in private conversation, "seems unable to resist the femme mecomprise [disillusioned woman]" (Jorgensen, 123). The description hardly did justice to Veblen, who was trying to resist just such a situation and, in fact, would never again find himself involved in one. But the circulation of such stories started the legend of the lecher whose only offense was, in truth, to ask for a divorce.

One can readily understand Veblen’s bitterness toward academic administration, given his treatment. But his sardonic hostility toward leisure itself, while leading to amusing perceptions, had him standing against the grain of history. The idea that modern consumer behavior could be traced back to primitive customs at best