Who was Thorstein Veblen?| | Home | Intro | Writings | biography | thoughts | contemporaries | institutionalism | |
Who was Thorstein Veblen?
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American economist and sociologist (social critic), one of the most creative mind in American social thought. * Valders, Municipality of Cato, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, U.S., July 30, 1857,
son of Norwegian Immigrants; |
He was a brilliant, multifaceted, and often difficult intellectual who gradually had a profound impact on thinking about economics and sociology, especially from the 1930s onward in the English-speaking countries.
In his analyses of economic institutions, Veblen criticized many of the industrialists whom classical economists considered heroes - those whose success he attributed more to fraud and exploitation than to industrial efficiency and workmanship. He condemned the acquisitiveness and wastefulness - what he termed "conspicuous consumption" - of the newly wealthy "leisure class." In retrospect, he is regarded as one of the most important thinkers and social critics of the so called Progressive Era (1900-1917).
His private "life was hair-raising. It was awful. His caracter was 'assassinated' at Chicago. His academic career was crippled at Stanford. Medical science destroyed his health with mercury poisoning in Idaho. His second wife, with whom he knew brief happiness, went mad". (Jorgensen & Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen. Victorian Firebrand, p. 183). With his first wife he had a lot of frustrating years in a relationship which seemed to be plantonic from the beginning on.
Veblen's health was poor and went poor. He suffered from hay-fever since his youth. One of his nostrils was blocked in a childhood accident, so that he could not properly project his voice and it might be that he had had a week heart. Last but not least, he smoked from youth on 'perique tobacco', in his later years 'turkish tobacco'. More than once he suffered from pneumonia. His heavily smoking caused problems with his legs, probably since 1915.
This is not the place to unfold Veblens ideas. But in brief: Veblen developed an economic sociology of capitalism that
criticized the acquisitiveness and predatory competition of American society and the power of the corporation. In all of his writings he combines history, sociology, and economics with biting satire and uncompromizing desire to get at the real reason why men act as they do.
He is best known for his book The Theory of The Leisure Class (1899), a classic of social theory. This book had a fermenting effect on economic and social thinking in America. In this book he argued that the dominant class in American capitalism, which he labeled as the 'leisure class', pursued a life-style of conspicuous consumption, waste and idleness. Intending to integrate political economy into the general movement of science, he discussed the evolution of the scientific point of view, the place of science within the framework of civilization, and the function of evolution within political economy.
His The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) contains a formulation fo the economic institutions, esp. of the machine process "and it's cultural incidence, the business depression, and the ramifications of business power in law and politics." Veblen's businessman makes profits not by providing an outlet for the forces of industrialization and social evolution but by distorting them: by engaging in monetary manipulations, by restricting output to keep prices artificially high, and by interfering with the engineers who actually produce goods and services.
Veblen believed that economics must not be studied as a closed system but rather as an aspect of a culture whose customs and habits constitute institutions that are rapidly changing.
The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (in Veblen's eyes his most important book) bears on Veblen's basic dichotomy, of the ever-threatening conflict between the technological institutions for the making of goods and the pecuniary ones for the making of money. This book is essentially a summary of his famous course on The Economic Factors in Civilisation.
In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution Veblen discussed the German empire from the beginnings to the eve of WW I. He compared Germany with England and commented on their different social organizations. He explores the good and ill wrought upon her by the effortless transformation.
In "The Higher Learning in America", he enlarged on the conduct of Universities by business man. The main point was, that business and business culture were dominating and infecting the institutions of higher learning, to the disadvantage of free and increasing knowledge.
References: Mitchell, Wesley, C.: Introduction to "What Veblen Taught", pp. vii-xliv (New York: The Viking Press, 1936)
Veblen's attacks on the business class and its ideology have caused violent controversies in America.
Despite his intellectual acclaim, he is largely ignored by mainstream economists. In Europe Veblen remained nearly unknown; e.g. in Germany, only The Theory of the Leisure Class was (freely) translated in 1958 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch). This book is available in paperback since 1981 (Munich: dtv, "Theorie der feinen Leute"), and again 1997 (Frankfurt/M., 'Fischer paperback'). It has not become a best-seller, even in the inexpensive editions.
Some General Resources on Sociology.