Background

Thorstein Bunde Veblen was born on July 30, 1857 in Cato, Wisconsin, the United States, and brought up on subsistence farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1847 from rural Norway. Veblen was the sixth of 12 children.

Education

Veblen did not learn English until he went to school, and all of his life he spoke it with an accent. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in three years, proving himself a brilliant scholar and a mocking individualist given to railing at established ideas. He went on to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Yale in 1884.

Career

After graduation from Yale University, unable to find a teaching position, Veblen returned to his father's farm in Minnesota, where he spent most of the next seven years reading. Still unable to find a job, he entered Cornell University in 1891 as a graduate student. There he impressed J. Laurence Laughlin so highly that, when Laughlin was asked to head the economics department at the new University of Chicago in 1892, he took Veblen with him as a fellow in economics. Not until 1896, when Veblen was 39, did he attain the rank of instructor.

His first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, subtitled An Economic Study of Institutions, was published in 1899. Still read today, it represents the essence of most of his thinking. Veblen sought to apply Darwin's evolutionism to the study of modern economic life. The industrial system, he wrote, required men to be diligent, efficient, and cooperative, while those who ruled the business world were concerned with making money and displaying their wealth; their outlook was survivalist, a remnant of a predatory, barbarian past. Veblen examined with obvious relish the "modern survivals of prowess" in the amusements, fashions, sports, religion, and aesthetic tastes of the ruling class. The book caught the interest of the literary world, where it was read as satire rather than as science and thereby earned Veblen a reputation as a social critic that extended far beyond his academic horizon.

His reputation, however, did not bring him academic success. He was an indifferent teacher with only contempt for the university ritual of lecture and examination. His most famous course, "Economic Factors in Civilization," ranged over vast fields of history, law, anthropology, and philosophy but paid little attention to orthodox economic theory. In 1904 he published The Theory of Business Enterprise, in which he expanded on his evolutionary theme of the incompatibility between the modern industrial process and the irrational means of business and finance (i.e., on the difference between making goods and making money).

At Chicago Veblen attained only the rank of assistant professor, and he was forced to leave after being charged with marital infidelity. He was appointed to an associate professorship at Stanford University in 1906. After three years his personal affairs once more became an issue, and he was forced to resign again.

With some difficulty, Veblen found a post as a lecturer at the University of Missouri, at a much lower salary, and he remained there from 1911 until 1918. At Missouri Veblen enjoyed a productive period. In The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), he elaborated on his idea that business enterprise was in fundamental conflict with the human propensity for useful effort; too much of humankind's energy was wasted through inefficient institutions. The outbreak of World War I deepened Veblen's pessimism for the prospects of the human race. In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), he suggested that Germany had an advantage over democratic states such as the United Kingdom and France because its autocracy was better able to channel the gains of modern technology toward the service of the state. He conceded that the advantage was only temporary, however, because the German economy would eventually develop its own system of conspicuous waste. With An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917), Veblen acquired an international following. He maintained that modern wars were caused mainly by the competitive demands of national business interests and that an enduring peace could be had only at the expense of "the rights of ownership, and of the price system in which these rights take effect."

In February 1918 he took a job with the Food Administration in Washington, D.C., but his approach to economic problems was of no use to government administrators, and he remained in the post less than five months. In the fall of 1918 he joined the editorial staff of The Dial, a literary and political magazine in New York, for which he wrote a series of articles on "The Modern Point of View and the New Order," later published in book form as The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919; republished as The Vested Interests and the Common Man: The Modern Point of View and the New Order). Another series of articles that appeared in The Dial was later published in the book The Engineers and the Price System (1921). In these pieces Veblen developed his ideas for reform of the economic system. He believed that engineers, who had the knowledge to run industry, should take over its direction because they would manage it for efficiency instead of profit. This theme was central to the brief Depression-era movement known as "technocracy."

At a time when his prestige in the literary world had reached new heights, Veblen's own life was going badly. He left The Dial after one year. His second wife had suffered a nervous collapse that was followed by her death in 1920. Veblen himself largely had to be looked after by a few devoted friends and appeared to be psychologically incapable of conversing with strangers interested in his ideas. For a while he lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City, his salary supported by a subsidy from a former student. His last book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923), was an ill-written and repetitious examination of corporate finance, in which he stressed again the contradiction between the industrial arts and business enterprise.

In 1926 he gave up teaching and returned to California, where he lived with a stepdaughter in a cabin in the mountains overlooking the sea. He remained there until the end of his life.

Achievements

• Thorstein Veblen is best known for coining the term "conspicuous consumption" in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He critiqued the consumption habits of the wealthy and questioned their values. Veblen also coined the terms "conspicuous waste" and "pecuniary emulation" and founded the school of institutional economics. The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) gives an annual Veblen-Commons award for work in Institutional Economics and publishes the Journal of Economic Issues.
  
  Veblen's work is often cited in American literary works. He is featured in The Big Money by John Dos Passos, and mentioned in Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Conspicuous Consumption

    (With its wry portrayal of a shallow, materialistic "leisu...)

    1899
  • The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts

    (The following work attempts an analysis of such correlati...)

    1914
  • The Engineers and the Price System

    (The Engineers and the Price System is a compilation of a ...)

    1921
  • Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times

    (Absentee Ownership is an inquiry into the economic situat...)

    1923
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class

    (In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen sets ...)

    1899
  • The Theory of Business Enterprise

    (The Theory of Business Enterprise is a political economy ...)

    1904
  • The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers

    (There is no system of economic theory more logical than t...)

    1906
  • Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution

    (The book was published in 1915, after the First World War...)

    1915
  • The Higher Learning In America 1918
  • An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation 1917
  • The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays 1906
  • The Vested Interests and the Common Man 1919
  • The Use of Loan Credit in Modern Business 1903

Politics

The American Midwest, during Veblen's youth, was the scene of repeated agrarian revolts and urban labor struggles. Many people were receptive to the reformist ideas of Henry George and Edward Bellamy, and scathing attacks on the great corporations by social critics like Henry Lloyd and Upton Sinclair were widely applauded. It was an age of head-on confrontations. But enthusiasm for Populism, radical unionism, Debs's brand of socialism, and for other left-leaning movements was, in Veblen's adult years, gradually eclipsed by increasing support for business and imperialist values. The outcome, which marked a major turning point in American history, was largely settled by 1920, at the expense of the radical protest movements; and Veblen, who was keenly interested in and sympathetic toward these movements, perceived far more clearly than most of his contemporaries the decisiveness of the triumph of business civilization. The study of that great development and of some responses to it became Veblen's life work. This is not to say that Veblen thought that the nature of change was reducible to the clash of business values with protest movements. Instead, he believed it hinged on the long-run, indirect, and often "opaque" interactions of both business values and various institutional norms with the "machine process" (which included, among other key elements, technology).

Veblen took no direct part in any social movement. Although basically critical of modern capitalist institutions and culture, he claimed to be a detached observer, above the battle. His ironic wit did not spare his friends; if he did not chastise them as much as he did his foes, he did so enough to support plausibly his claim to objectivity. His general orientation, of course, was unmistakably leftward, and his career is a minor chapter in the history of American radicalism.

Views

Although Veblen's major works in the social sciences were produced over four decades and cover a wide variety of concrete topics, their central ideas show a high degree of consistency. This unity derives from the fact that three important intellectual strands run through all of Veblen's work: Darwinian evolutionism, Utopian anarchism, and Marxism, each of which Veblen developed in an original way.

The element in Darwinism that especially influenced Veblen was its implication that individuals have little or no control over the forces of change. His focus on this aspect of historical development helped to correct the overemphasis of the classical economists and of Marx on the role of rational decisions in social life. However, unlike many social scientists of the time, including William Graham Sumner, his own teacher at Yale, Veblen implicitly denied the relevance for social science of such other key Darwinian concepts as natural selection, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, he believed, tended only to reinforce capitalist values.

Somewhat more important in Veblen's work than evolutionism was the strand of Utopian anarchism. His vague picture of the prehistoric "savage state," in effect a primeval golden age, was based on the conjectural evolutionary theories of the anthropologist L. H. Morgan and on Veblen's own interpretation of anthropological and archeological reports.

Certain of Veblen's core ideas are strikingly similar to those of Marx, not in terminology but in content. The principal similarities are an emphasis on class and on economic and property institutions as keys to historical change, and the relegation of ideological elements to secondary importance; a belief in the proposition that crises of overproduction are inherent in capitalist economies; a conception of class structure as resting primarily on two mutually antagonistic groups of occupations (in Veblen's case, these two groups consisted of business owners and industrial producers); a view of the modern state as "an executive committee for businessmen" and a conviction that states are bound to become involved in militarism and war.

Veblen analyzed human behavior primarily in terms of instincts and habits, and social processes in terms of culture lag. He distinguished three "instincts," all of which he considered benevolent and all of which, in fact, he used as norms: the parental bent, a benevolent feeling toward kin and fellowman; the instinct or sense of workmanship, a desire to maximize production of goods and services and to do a job well for its own sake; and idle curiosity, the most difficult of the three to define.

Veblen's primary interest was in the analysis of latter-day industrial society, but characteristically he took a long historical view. Thus, in his Instinct of Workmanship (1914) he attempted a social-evolutionary analysis of stages preceding the emergence of modern society.

He divided social evolution into two great phases; the prehistoric "savage state" and the "predatory society." Except for the unduly idyllic description of the former phase, Veblen's outlines of social evolution roughly parallel those of such later authorities as V. Gordon Childe and Leslie White.

Veblen had a quiet, alienated, and profound vision for economists. He raised crucial questions related to the behavior of the economic man. In running down the robber barons of his era, as well as other businessmen, and in seeing the impact of technology as the major source of economic change in the modern era, Veblen arguably presented to his peers and to the public some of the most revolutionary modern thinking on the subject of business and commerce activities.

Quotations: "The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before."

"In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing."

"Here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity."

"Any evolutionary science... is a close-knit body of theory. It is a theory of a process, of an unfolding sequence... of cumulative causation. The great deserts of the evolutionist leaders... lie... in their having shown how this colorless impersonal sequence of cause and effect can be made use of for theory proper, by virtue of its cumulative character."

"The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life."

"In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth."

"In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes."

"From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons."

"The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction."

"However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods."

"While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time."

"The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay."

"In the modern industrial communities... the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous... that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help."

"The latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution, the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the man... has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces. But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding mark of the unfree servant."

"In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum."

Personality

Veblen was a pessimist who never committed himself to any form of political action. Among economists, he had both admirers and critics, but more of the latter.

Quotes from others about the person

• C. Wright Mills: "Veblen ... was a masterless, recalcitrant man, and if we must group him somewhere in the American scene, it is with those most recalcitrant Americans, the Wobblies. On the edges of the higher learning, Veblen tried to live like a Wobbly. It was a strange place for such an attempt. The Wobblies were not learned, but they were, like Veblen, masterless men, and the only non-middle class movement of revolt in twentieth-century America. With his acute discontent and shyness of program Veblen was a sort of intellectual Wobbly."
  
  Cynthia Eagle Russett: "If Veblen failed to develop an evolutionary methodology, he also failed to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory to explain in detail how institutions evolve in the cultural environment and what sorts of interaction occur between economic activity and institutional structures. Veblen was something of an intellectual butterfly, and he often lacked the patience to elaborate his ideas into a coherent system. But he teemed with fragmentary insights, and these can be pieced together to suggest the outlines of a Veblenian scheme of cultural evolution - what might be called a 'pre-theory' of cultural change."

Interests

• Economics, sociology, philosophy

Connections

In 1888 Thorstein Veblen married Ellen Rolfe, a member of a wealthy and influential family. Later, he was divorced by her and in 1914 married Anne Fessenden Bradley, a divorcee whom he had known for some years. She had two daughters, whom she brought up according to Veblen's utilitarian ideas as expressed in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Anne had suffered a nervous collapse that was followed by her death in 1920.

Father:

Thomas Anderson Veblen

(2 October 1818 - 18 August 1906)

Mother:

Kari Bunde Veblen

(September 1825 - 1907)

ex-spouse:

Ellen May Rolfe

late spouse:

Anne Fessenden Bradley

(26 December 1877 - 7 October 1920)

colleague:

John Bates Clark

(26 January 1847 - 21 March 1938)

John Bates Clark was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics.

Friend:

Charles Peirce

Friend:

Charles Beard

Friend:

John Dewey

References

• The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues Scholars attempting to place Veblen in a particular intellectual tradition will only succeed in reaping frustration and confusion until it is recognized that he was primarily sui generis and eclectic. This is the recurring theme that is made explicit in the introduction, conclusion, and some of the chapters of this work.
  1992
• Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation This is a brilliant and unconventional study of one of the most challenging figures in modern social and economic thought. David Riesman has chosen a deliberately personal method of exposition and evaluation, and he is by no means a disciple. He says of Veblen: "I find him more often interesting than attractive, more often pungent than wise." By approaching Veblen subjectively and in a critical spirit, Riesman has arrived at an estimate of the man that is objective and balanced.
  1953
• Veblen's Century: A Collective Portrait Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the "home" of Veblen, books on him were offered to the firm for reissuing. Thus, the inclusion of contemporary masters who knew Veblen, as well as those writing on specific texts enhance the volume.
  2001
• Thorstein Veblen and His America A book by Joseph Dorfman.
  1934
• The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory A book by John P. Diggins.
  1972