The Theory of the Leisure Class

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Theory of the Leisure Class, The (1899). In his best‐known book, the economist Thorstein Veblen satirized the Gilded Age moneyed class, deconstructed the “rational man” of neoclassical economics, and redefined economics as the study of the cultural meanings imputed to material goods. Veblen portrayed an economic order shaped not by Adam Smith's “hidden hand” but by the institutionalization of “barbarian traits” underlying all social conventions. When a “predatory” class of capitalists enshrined private property and enriched itself by controlling society's surplus labor, work became a badge of low status rather than a source of pride, while the ostentatious avoidance of work signaled higher status. Veblen dissected the leisure class's culture of “wastemanship” in fashion, architecture, entertainment, leisure, and many other areas. The elaborate, confining dresses of rich women, for example, indicated their freedom from productive labor. The habit of “conspicuous consumption,” he argued, shaped morality, aesthetics, religion, education, and marital alliances, fortifying a parasitic regime. Inverting a familiar social Darwinist argument, Veblen contended that the leisure class retarded social progress by sheltering itself from the economic forces that encouraged adaption.

Veblen shared Karl Marx's tendency to romanticize preindustrial labor, and his arcane vocabulary obscured his aims and blurred the crucial distinction between biology and culture, leading to specious ethnic and racial generalizations. The relationship between social class and culture would change dramatically in succeeding decades, as non‐elites became consumers of mass‐produced goods and the upper class's tastemaking role eroded. Nevertheless, The Theory of the Leisure Class, prophetic in its attention to consumerism, remains a penetrating critique of the subtle exercise of power in modern society.
See also Capitalism; Clothing and Fashion; Consumer Culture; Economics; Social Darwinism; Sociology.

Bibliography

David Riesman , Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation, 1953.
John P. Diggins , The Bard of Savagery, 1978.
Rick Tilman , Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1992.

Andrew Chamberlin Rieser

Theory of the Leisure Class, The, economic treatise by Thorstein Veblen, published in 1899. The book enjoyed a popular vogue and profoundly influenced economic thought, but provoked controversial replies, of which the most sensational was Mencken's Professor Veblen in Prejudices (1919).

This description of habits and customs in modern life as “atavistic cultural survivals” contends that the institution of the Leisure Class arose during a predatory stage of barbarism, in conjunction with the institution of ownership. This was foreshadowed during the initial stage of peaceful savagery, when there began to be distinctions between the status of men and women. Woman's work, creation by the manipulation of inanimate materials, symbolized the instinct of workmanship and the beginning of industry. Man's work came to symbolize the advent of nonindustrial employments by acts of exploit, “the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other by another agent.” Employment of other classes for wages is the modern form of exploit of that class, which emerges from the predatory stage as a social group living without recourse to industrial employment. The Leisure Class in the modern environment consists of those who enjoy freedom from irksome and undignified labor and who through successful acts of aggression are bent upon establishing their honorific distinction by conspicuous leisure and notable accumulations of wealth. Entrance to this class is by pecuniary fitness, which is exhibited by conspicuously wasteful consumption, setting standards according to canons of taste determined by wealth. This class, by force of mutual interest and instinct, and by precept and proscriptive example, not only perpetuates the existing maladjustment of institutions, but even favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life.