Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929), sociologist, economist, social critic.Raised by frugal Norwegian parents on the Wisconsin frontier, Thorstein Veblen graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota and studied
philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities (with the sociologist and champion of
social Darwinism William Graham Sumner). Although educated and socialized to middle‐class norms, Veblen remained a perpetual outsider. He dressed eccentrically, spoke with a difficult accent, and wrote about American customs in the manner of an anthropologist researching an alien culture. Witty and erudite yet often aloof from colleagues and students, he had a well‐deserved reputation as a womanizer that contributed to his dismissal from academic posts at Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, and Missouri. Veblen died alone in a mountain cabin above Palo Alto, California.
Veblen's most significant contribution to American social thought lay in redefining
economics as the study of cultural meanings imputed to material goods. Classical economics, which he rejected, reduced human behavior to an idealized model of rational economic calculation in which the inexorable laws of commerce and Adam Smith's “invisible hand” combined to assure social progress. For Veblen, the prototypical rational man of classical economics did not exist. In
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he traced the corruption of the instinct for “workmanship” in a commercial society.
Work, originally a source of pride, became irksome by its association with lower status. To flaunt its privileged avoidance of labor, the “leisure class” developed an elaborate hierarchy of “wastemanship” involving the ostentatious display of surplus wealth and the virtual ownership of women. Through patterns of intermarriage and emulation, “conspicuous consumption” saturated morality, aesthetics,
religion, and education, thus fortifying a “pecuniary” social order.
Although primarily a critique of the subtle exercise of power, Veblen's book gained popularity as a biting satire of upper‐class pretensions. Turning to the political implications of his theory, Veblen in
The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904),
The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), and
Engineers and the Price System (1921) issued dire warnings and tentative solutions. As the profit motive eroded the instinct for industry, he argued, a conservative regime of business managers was increasingly corrupting the democratic process. Expanding the Darwinian theme of his first book—in which workers forced to adapt to the changing economic environment were the fittest to survive and progress—Veblen saw hope in an alliance of workers and engineers dedicated to the rational and systematic solution of social problems. A reluctant reformer at best, Veblen moved to
Washington, D.C., in 1917 to support the war effort and then to
New York City, where radical postwar intellectuals enlisted him in the revolt against the Victorian establishment.
Subsequent scholars who braved Veblen's turgid prose found him a compelling yet puzzling thinker. Some wondered if his legendary sense of irony hinted at radical thoughts he dared not express directly. But Veblen resisted easy categorization: He was critical of mass culture but too irreverent to be a conservative; hostile to big
business but too pessimistic to be a liberal; insightful about capitalist hegemony but too skeptical to be a Marxist. Feminists applauded his insights into patriarchy and his support of woman suffrage, but questioned his personal behavior. In the 1930s, New Dealers posthumously adopted him as a theoretician of government intervention. Critics continue to debate his historical significance, admiring his prophetic attention to
consumer culture but finding his biological determinism problematic.
See also
Engineering;
Gilded Age;
Progressive Era;
Social Class;
Social Science;
Sociology;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
Joseph Dorfman , Thorstein Veblen and His America, With New Appendices, 1966.
John P. Diggins , The Bard of Savagery, 1978.
Rick Tilman , Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1992.
Andrew Chamberlin Rieser
