W.[esley] C.[lair] Mitchell:
'Thorstein Veblen: 1857-1929.' [Obituary]
'Economic Journal', Dec., 1929, vol. 39, pp. 646-650.

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According to its indexes, the 'Economic Journal' has reviewed but one of 
Thorstein Veblen's eleven books. The issue of September 1925 contains a notice 
of 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' - a volume published twenty-six years 
earlier and just then reprinted for the ninth time. It seems a natural 
inference that Veblen's work is not widely known to British economists. Among 
American economists, on the contrary, no contemporary stands out more 
clearly from the crowd. Opinions differ sharply concerning the value of his 
contributions, critical and constructive; but there is no doubt that his 
influence is wide and deep.

To account for the slight attention paid to Veblen outside of his own country 
is not difficult. Professor Graham Wallas, who owns a desire "to give him the 
old-fashioned name of 'genius,'" sorrowfully confesses that "Veblen's books 
are, even for a professional student, pretty stiff reading."1) The subject-
matter is difficult in that Veblen attacks problems strange to economists and 
uses evidence few of us can weigh. Even more disconcerting to many is his 
style - and in his case certainly the style is the man. Professor Wallas 
wished Veblen "to write a new book, in which he shall drop the irony and 
reticence which is such an admirable means of self-protection for a sensitive 
teacher who thinks for himself." That Veblen could not or would not do. He 
was an original, whom the discipline of life in a land of "regular fellows" 
could not standardize. Those who strive to profit by his uncanny penetration 
into the foibles of modern society do well to study first his strange personal 
equation.

A son of Norwegian immigrants, born in Wisconsin in 1857 and brought up on a 
farm in Minnesota, Veblen did not come into close contact with English-
speaking Americans until at twenty years of ape he entered Carleton College 
- a small congregational institution near hhis home. He found his new 
associates queer people. They accepted without question conventional modes of 
thinking and acting quite different from those which prevailed among his own 
people. Veblen had the strength of mind to resist assimilation, and the urge 
to inquire how conventions arise and spread. Also he took a naughty pleasure 
in quizzing earnest souls who felt it bad form to probe respectable beliefs. 
He loved to propound elaborate explanations for things which most people 
regard as the plainest common sense. And the more these explanations made 
folk squirm, the more Veblen enjoyed them.

With this trait Veblen united wide curiosity and remarkable powers of 
assimilating knowledge. He was a close observer of plants and animals as well 
as of people, a deft craftsman who liked to experiment with new materials, a 
quick linguist, an omnivorous reader. Among all the routes leading to the 
unknown regions he longed to explore, philosophy seemed to his youthful mind 
the most promising. After graduating from Carleton College he went to Johns 
Hopkins and then to Yale, where in 1884 he took a doctor's degree in 
philosophy, with a dissertation upon "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of 
Retribution." But he could find no opening to teach: in those days chairs of 
philosophy were usually occupied by retired clergymen. Returning to 
Minnesota, Veblen remained a studious recluse for seven years. Finally, in 
1891, an opportunity came to enter Cornell as a student of economics. From 
that lime forward he lived a none-too-smooth life as teacher and writer upon 
economics, passing in succession to Chicago, Stanford, Missouri and the New 
School for Social Research in New York, where he lectured from 1918 until his 
retirement in 1926.

Veblen thus brought to economics the detachment of a visitor from Mars, a 
confirmed habit of ironical expression, a .specialist's grounding in 
philosophy, and the loot of much miscellaneous reading. A man familiar with 
Kant is not over-awed by the technical parts of economic theory. Nor docs he 
miss the philosophical implications of what is said. Veblen was intrigued by 
what seemed to him the naive preconceptions entertained by the masters of 
political economy from Dr. Quesnay to Dr. Marshall. In particular their 
notions of human nature seemed to him curious. Contemporary theorists had not 
really freed themselves from that rationalized concept of behaviour which 
Bentham had set forth in such downright fashion. Yet Darwin's studies of the 
instincts, supplemented by William James's analysis of the formation and 
functioning of habits, had reduced the felicific calculus from its eighteenth-
century status as an instrument of scientific inquiry to the status of a 
quaint delusion. Even the attenuated modern forms of this calculus were 
mischievous in that they diverted attention from genuine problems. Veblen did 
not say all this in good round terms. That was not his way. He explained that 
the conclusions reached by economic theorists were quite consistent with the 
premises, overt and tacit, from which the theorists reasoned. He sought to 
show how the notions of human nature employed had become current. He inquired 
why the pale ghost of hedonism still haunted economic treatises after the body 
had been decently buried in treatises upon psychology. In short, he dealt 
quizzically with economic theory as an intellectual curiosity which called for 
explanation, and thereby annoyed many people who would have taken a frontal 
attack with good grace.

The fundamental difficulty with economics, in his view, was that it does not 
conceive its problems in the proper way. Under the spell of Darwin, Veblen 
held that -

In so far as it is a science in the current sense of the term, any science, 
such as economics, which has to do with human conduct, becomes a genetic 
inquiry into the human scheme of life; and where, as in economics, the subject 
of inquiry is the conduct of man in his dealings with the material means of 
life, the science is necessarily an inquiry into the life-history of material 
civilisation, on a more or less extended or restricted plan. … Like all human 
culture this material civilisation is a scheme of institutions - 
institutional fabric and institutional growth.2)

Institutions "are settled habits of thought common to the generality of 
men."3) The problems proper to economics, accordingly, are problems of genesis 
and cumulative change in widely-diffused habits of thought concerning ways 
and means. Such problems must be treated in terms of causation, not in terms 
of rational choice.

The two methods of inference - from sufficient reason and from efficient cause 
- are out of touch with one another and theere is no transition from one to the 
other: no method of converting the procedure or the results of the one into 
those of the other.4)

In his constructive work Veblen followed the line thus marked out. He 
investigated a variety of institutions, or institutional complexes, from the 
leisure class to the machine process, business enterprise and absentee 
ownership. Always he sought to explain in causal terms why a certain way of 
looking at things arose and why that way changed in the course of time. Always 
he treated behaviour as a whole, not caring to mark off a narrow segment as 
strictly economic. Always he saw contemporary man as a product of age-long 
savagery, bewildered by the changes in conditions which he has unwittingly 
brought upon himself. And always Veblen played with the feelings of his readers 
quite as much as he played with ideas. Even when he dealt with questions which 
have a place in standard treatises on economics - such as credit, business 
combinations, profits, socialism - he drew little from, and he contributed 
little to, the standard discussions. For the problems which he thought 
significant are not the problems ordinarily attacked. As he put it, inference 
from efficient cause and inference from sufficient reason are out of touch 
with one another, and there is no transition from one to the other. Quite 
naturally many economists held that whatever his work may be, it is not 
economic theory.

We shall have no more of these investigations, with their curious erudition, 
their irony, their dazzling phrases, their bewildering reversals of problems 
and values. Veblen died in July, among the Californian hills which he fondly 
likened to the lands that never were outside of William Morris's romances. But 
those whose intellectual interests are not limited to conventional lines will 
long find in his work a treasure of subtle suggestion. The sophisticated who 
can bear to have their share in human frailty exposed will read with quaking 
pleasure. Perhaps the best book to sample by way of introduction is the volume 
of collected essays, entitled 'The Place of Science in Modern Civilization' 
(1919). 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' (1899) is the most playful and 
popular of the full-length discussions, while 'Absentee Ownership' (1923) is 
starkly terrible at times beneath its bland surface. Economists will feel most 
at home with 'The Theory of Business Enterprise' (1904), psychologists with 
'The Instinct of Workmanship' (1914), and political scientists with 
'Imperial Germany' (1915) or with 'An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the 
Terms of in Perpetuation' (1917). But Veblen demands much of his readers, and 
not everyone who sips will have the stamina to drink.

Notes:
1) "Veblen's 'Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution'." 'Quarterly 
Journal of Economics', November 1915: vol. XXX, pp. 179-87.
2) "The Limitations of Marginal Utility," 1909. Republished in 'The Place 
of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays,' New York, 1919, pp. 
240, 241.
3) Ibid., p. 239.
4) 'The Limitations of Marginal Utility, ' 1909. Republished in 'The 
Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays', New York, 1919, 
p. 237.
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