‘Thorstein Veblen’
From Everyman.

‘The Columbia Missourian’, no. 35, p. 4, Oct., 12, 1929.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you were to ask any American acquainted with the literature of the social 
sciences to name the most original mind in that field during the past thirty 
years, the answer would almost certainly be Thorstein Veblen. This remarkable 
man is dead in California ant the age of 72, and save for a few paragraphs 
the event has passes without notice in England. Veblen was of Scandinavian 
stock and for half a century he taught in American colleges, mainly in the 
West. A dozen years ago I made a journey to the University of Missouri in the 
hope of having a talk with him. We met and my reward was, literally, two 
sentences. One could not break through his reserve, either in the quiet of a 
Western campus or in the buzz of a faculty group in New York. But in the 
classroom or with pen in hand he was inexhaustible. Thirty years ago he 
published “The Theory of the Leisure Class” and the judgment of his admirers 
is that it was a book of the kind that a man could not hope to equal. Veblen 
had an original and searching intelligence and he was a master of the ironic 
method. There are many pages of his masterpiece which are a delight to reread 
and the whole thing is unlike anything else in American or English sociology. 
His later books were mostly difficult and cacophonous; his style as a rule 
was atrocious. For some years after the war Veblen was associated with the 
New School of Social Research in New York. His students were not many, but 
his influence was widespread. Somewhat late in life his academic career was 
upset by a romantic adventure.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------