J.[ohn] M.[aurice] Clark Thorstein Bundy Veblen 1857-1929 [Obituary] American Economic Review, December 1929, vol. 19. pp. 742-745. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- On August 3 of this year (1929) Thorstein B. Veblen died in California at the age of seventy-two, after a period of retirement due to ill health. With his passing, American economics has lost its most picturesque figure, and the leading influence of the intellectual generation immediately succeeding the founders of the American Economic Association. In the spring of 1880 a member of the Junior class at Carleton College presented to the faculty an unprecedented request. He asked to be permitted, at the end of that academic year, to take the examinations for the Junior and Senior classes both. Attempts to dissuade him were futile; he took all responsibility and asked only to make the attempt at his own risk. The task .seemed impossible, as the academic year was already far spent; and the faculty feared injury to his health. Nor were they inclined to make concessions to this particular student, whose unconventional character had not endeared him to an institution where smoking was ground for expulsion and the professor of mathematics opened every class exercise with prayer. But permission could hardly be refused; and the tests were given, that in economics being under a young professor by the name of John Bates Clark. It soon became evident that the student could not be baffled by any legitimate question; and he passed a virtually flawless examination. In this manner Thorstein Veblen received his college degree, rated by one at least of his professors as the most brilliant man the college had graduated. Eleven years later, J. Laurence Laughlin, rising young professor at Cornell, made the acquaintance of a young Fellow in the department; a man worn with illness and plainly a stranger to prosperity, but with an intellectual vitality and a fund of wide and curious learning which so impressed him that when he went next year to head the department at the new University of Chicago he took the young Fellow with him. Thus Veblen began his academic career in economics. He had taken his doctor's degree in philosophy at Yale in 1884, and subsequently continued by private reading to add to his erudition in the fields of biology, anthropology, and cultural history. This constituted, for an economist, a unique background. At Chicago, before the end of the nineties, his early critical essays challenged the attention of the economic world with their unaccustomed standards and unsettling demands. Then followed his career on the faculties of Stanford, the University of Missouri and the New School for Social Research; and the succession of volumes which established his reputation. Always aloof from the organized activities, of the economic guild, he was in 1926 offered the nomination for presidency of the American Economic Association, but declined. As to the merits of his work, opinions differ more widely and more fervently than on any other writer of equal prominence. He is rated among the great economists of history, or as no economist at all; as a great original pioneer or as a critic and satirist without constructive talent or achievement. And he was, one might almost say, all of these things; from different standpoints and by different criteria, each of which it is possible to understand and even to appreciate. One thing at least can be said. If he chose to paint after a futurist technique of his own devising, it was not for lack of capacity to master the academic canons. He had thought through them to his own satisfaction and passed on to other areas of inquiry which appeared to him more interesting and more fruitful. His critical essays probably left the majority of readers, who were not forewarned and prepared, resentfully rubbing numerous sore spots and wondering with some bewilderment what it was all about. They were criticized for not doing what they had never set out to do, and for not being what it had never occurred to them to be; while the worth of what they had undertaken was brushed aside with airy disparagement. And Veblen's style resembled a barbed-wire entanglement, difficult to penetrate and with rapier-sharp points to prick the unwary. Those who quickly dismissed the problem are probably those who have not seen Veblen as an economist at alt, or have seen him as merely a critic and satirist. Those who continued to wonder, and to some purpose, owe him the greatest of educational experiences: that of being forced to rethink their basic conceptions, and to make terms of some son with a radically different point of view which could not be wholly dismissed. His positive analysis of economic society includes two main groups of elements. There are evolutionary studies of our ways of thinking and of doing things. These include the effects of changing economic techniques (e. g. the ‘Cultural Incidence of the Machine Process’) and the continuing effect of older cultural forces (e.g. the ‘Theory of the Leisure class’). These studies regularly culminate in a changed perspective on the character of the present economic system. In this, the second group of elements in Veblen's positive analysis, he focused attention on those things which were left out of the customary study of levels of static-competitive equilibrium. His treatment of pecuniary as distinct from industrial employments would be regarded by the orthodox economist as a study largely in the realm of the "higgling" of the bargaining process: something whose existence he readily admitted but which he excluded from the search for competitive norms, treating it as a somewhat incidental excrescence. By styling this process "business" Veblen added the implication that this neglected activity is the main preoccupation and effect of private business, and that the limitations imposed on it by competition are incidental and not sufficiently effective to deserve serious analysis. Their results he admitted casually, if at all, under the modicum of serviceability which is prerequisite to pecuniary profit, not troubling even to trace this to its causes. After which he would often clinch the effect by remarking that if the terms he had used seemed to carry unfavorable implications, this was solely the result of the nature of the facts themselves. Thus did he thinly mask a surpassingly able use of the logical devices of selective emphasis - devices not found in treatises on the syllogism but ever-present in the actual processes of human thinking. Veblen's analysis, then, is not the completely objective tracing of impersonal sequences of cause and effect which his essays on method call for; but is - as anything human must probably be - a matter of selected aspects. One of the unanswered puzzles about this intriguing thinker, at least to those who did not know him intimately, b his own attitude toward this subjective element entering into his avowedly objective treatment. It may be a trait of genius to combine clear consciousness of method with a gift of leaping over some of the steps and intuitively seizing tools apt to the securing of desired effects. And there is no point in obtruding ponderous questionings upon such a delightfully agile play of thought around a theme whose essential consistency is so plainly evident. Doubtless the facts did dictate the interpretation Veblen gave them - he being what he was. But among the most controlling of these facts was the selective emphasis he found in the orthodox treatment. And by presenting selective aspects calculated to offset those of orthodoxy, he has rendered the greatest possible service toward a better balanced treatment than either. And in this matter balance is probably the closest approach to objectivity of which the human mind is capable. This end, needless to say, cannot be attained by blind discipleship, but by a discriminating assimilation. And such assimilation has not been wanting. Veblen has influenced Davenport, Mitchell and Hoxie, to name only three men of too great independence to be anyone's disciples and therefore capable of transmitting Veblen's influence as it needed to be transmitted. In such hands it becomes, not a finished gospel, but an orienting impulse and an assortment of concepts to be tested by the work they will do. Was Veblen an economist? He was not a mere economist, certainly. A philosopher first, and then a student of human cultures, he was always interested in these things for their own sakes as well as in their relation to purely economic facts. Was he a scientist? He was not, perhaps, by the criterion of John Stuart Mill, who held that it was only by virtue of competition and competitive equilibria that economists can be scientists at all. But that criterion can no longer be said to be orthodox. Was Veblen "constructive"? Not in the sense of constructing a "system" of defined levels of equilibrium or other definitive results; the materials with which he worked did not lend themselves to this nor was it his idea of a proper (and Darwinian) scientific goal. Not in the sense of making his work an outgrowth of previous orthodoxy; that was not to be expected. Not in the sense of furnishing his followers a complete substitute for that orthodoxy in the form of propositions with which to solve all problems - that is far more than one man's work. He was not constructive in the sense of explaining the socially constructive forces in the world of private business - it was not in that direction that the prevailing emphasis needed to be redressed. And not in the sense of proving to what quantitative degree business is governed by the principles he assumes - that test is only beginning to be applied to any of our doctrines. But if an independent explanation of important and neglected ranges of economic facts be constructive, Veblen meets the test in generous measure. And he has left his mark. Since he began his work, the conception of the evolution of economic institutions has acquired the beginnings of real meaning for a majority of economists; and "cumulative causation" is part of our mental equipment. The emphasis has swung from reasoning on abstract levels of equilibrium to the observation of actual behavior and the organization of its sequences; and man is beginning to be really viewed as a product of a biological past rather than as a utilitarian machine. We are suspicious of subconscious motives and alert to wastes inherent in business practices. Veblen is of course, not responsible for all this; and much of it has taken forms he never espoused or practised. But there is enough of his influence in it to make us wonder whether we have not had a prophet among us. A prophet's road is not the route to easy popularity with his contemporaries. Bin this one has not been wholly without honor, even in his own country. ----------------------------------------------------------------------