Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, was born on July 30, 1857, at Cato, Wisconsin, the fourth of twelve children, and grew up on a farm in Rice County, Minnesota, around 45 miles south of Minneapolis. His parents were Norwegian immigrants, and there is a tradition emphasizing the family's poverty that is overdrawn. Both parents were able and intelligent, the mother high-spirited and outgoing, the father more of a brooder, also a skilled carpenter, cabinet maker, and farmer. Money was tight but family members would never have thought of themselves as poor. They lived among other Norwegian immigrants and spoke Norwegian at home; Thorstein and his siblings learned English at school and spoke it with an accent all their lives. There was in the community both a conservative ethos that valued useful work, such as is performed on a farm, and an interest in ideas and education: in the Veblen family, ties were decided in favor of the latter, and, in what at the time qualified as an unconventional attitude favoring gender equality, the girls as well as the boys were sent to college--several, including Thorstein, were among the early graduates of Carleton College, at the nearby town of Northfield. In a characteristic move, the father purchased, cheaply, a plot of land near the college and built on it himself a modest house for his children to inhabit while attending college, thereby defraying the expense.
One way of sketching in Veblen's biography is to tick through his long association with academic institutions: undergraduate at Carleton, graduate school at Johns Hopkins, PhD from Yale with a lost dissertation on Kant, more graduate studies at Cornell, and then academic appointments at Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Missouri. His peregrinations through academia should not be attributed to high demand for his services. Rather, he seems to have been unfit for any other kind of work, and a few influential academics, recognizing his idiosyncratic brilliance, helped him secure academic appointments notwithstanding his unfitness for those positions, too. By all accounts, he was a terrible teacher--he mumbled his lectures, cared little about students (whose numbers always dwindled as the term progressed), and, most interestingly, was a source of scandal for his extra-marital philanderings. He always seemed rustic, with his accent, indifference to dress and personal appearance, and aloof scorn for conventionality--these attributes, which disqualified him from many employments, seem to have made him irresistible to a substantial subset of females. Every essay on him takes note of his famous complaint, "What is one to do if the woman moves in on you?" Time to move on down the road to a new institution of higher learning.
The details of a seven year hiatus after taking his Yale PhD do not, on reflection, seem particularly odd once you've become familiar with Veblen's brand of oddness. Notwithstanding his education and reputation for brilliance, he returned to the farm, and could not find employment. Probably he didn't try very hard, but it's also true that teaching positions were often at religious institutions, and he was forthright about his agnosticism. So he lounged around the farm, reading everything--according to Robert Heilbroner's chapter on him in The Worldly Philosophers, "everything" included, but wasn't limited to, "political tracts, economics, sociology, Lutheran hymn books, treatises in anthropology." For seven years. Toward the end of this period, he married the niece of the president of Carleton College, whom he had gotten to know during undergraduate days, and through some connection of hers he was supposedly in line to become an economics advisor for a railroad. This fell through, as did the marriage, eventually and predictably. Finally he went back to school, this time Cornell, where a professor, J. Laurence Laughlin, became one of his sponsors through his not altogether glittering academic career. John Kenneth Galbraith describes the scene in his book, Annals of an Abiding Liberal:
Joseph Dorfman of Columbia University, an eminent student of American economic thought and the preeminent authority of Veblen, tells of Laughlin's meeting with Veblen in Thorstein Veblen and His America, a massive book to which everyone who speaks or writes on Veblen is indebted. Laughlin "was sitting in his study in Ithaca when an anemic-looking person, wearing a coonskin cap and corduroy trousers, entered and in the mildest possible tone announced: 'I am Thorstein Veblen.' He told Laughlin of his academic history, his enforced idleness, and his desire to go on with his studies. The fellowships had all been filled, but Laughlin was so impressed with the quality of the man that he went to the president and other powers of the university and secured a special grant."
Apart from the impression that Veblen's manner and dress so conveyed, the account is important for another reason. Always in Veblen's life there were individuals--a small but vital few--who strongly sensed his talents. Often, as in the case of Laughlin, they were conservatives--men who, in ideas and habits of life, were a world apart from Veblen. Repeatedly these good men rescued or protected their prodigious but always inconvenient friend.
In 1899, when Veblen was 42 and at the University of Chicago, having followed Laughlin there from Cornell, he published his first and best book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A brief survey of this unusual work might begin with the observation that its publication roughly coincided with high tide of the era Mark Twain christened "The Gilded Age," a period of ruthless and unregulated business practices, the accumulation of almost unimaginable fortunes, railroad magnates and robber barons, Ford and Getty, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. That academic economics in our country still slavishly followed the classical model, featuring preeminently the wonderful world of Adam Smith, wherein the laws of supply and demand and the beneficent invisible hand steer markets and the world toward perfection, tends to prove Orwell's maxim concerning how it requires a constant effort to notice what is six inches in front of your nose. Some have speculated that Veblen's position as an immigrant outsider helped him to notice.
The book introduced into the language the term "conspicuous consumption," which refers to the phenomenon of the wealthy spending lavishly on items of dubious utility in order to display their wealth. This theme is developed along a couple of planes. In the realm of social science, it provides an account of actual observed behavior. According to classical theory, shrewd maximizers of their own financial interest never buy unneeded goods or services, or overpay for needed ones. Whence, then, gold-gilded mansions, luxury automobiles, vacation villas, wardrobes that could not be contained within the houses of the working class? The concept of utility cannot be conceived simply. There is pleasure in being the object of envy and the inspiration for--another new term--"pecuniary emulation," whereby people buy things they can't afford in order to imitate the habits of the rich. Veblen may be regarded as the founder of the field known as behavioral economics and seems to have anticipated the findings of its practitioners, such as that in an economic slump people tend to retrench on food before terminating their accounts with Netflix and Verizon or trading in the big sedan.
So there is this social science analysis aspect to the work--which, it's easy to see, might also supply a pretty ripe target for a satirist. And this is another plane on which Theory of the Leisure Class succeeded. Indeed, many of the most enthusiastic reviews came, not from social scientists, but from literary people, such as the novelist William Dean Howells. The work is a rhetorical triumph. The author proceeds, by a brocaded, polysyllabic style, to his withering conclusions without any trace of emotion or animus. Recall the "treatises on anthropology" that Heilbroner reports Veblen to have devoured during his seven year sabbatical at his parents' farm. The conceit, through long stretches of Leisure Class, is that the American rich are fit subjects of anthropological field studies, and Veblen calmly examines their ways. He doesn't condemn them, just as scholars of Polynesian villagers or exotic tribesmen in equatorial Africa don't condemn their subjects. This veil of academic urbanity is never breeched, and one starts to wonder to what degree it's even an artifice. A tour de force of social criticism.
In 1899, Veblen's life was more than half over, and, after the notoriety Leisure Class attained for him within a circumscribed set subsided, his days returned to their rather gray contours. He continued to move from university to university, and he continued to write. Many themes of his later works were adumbrated in Leisure Class. The Theory of Business Enterprise is concerned with the tension between, on the one hand, the cold precision of technological and engineering processes and, on the other, the unpredictable turns of competition and conflict that rule the moneymaking setting in which these processes operate. The last chapter of Leisure Class is entitled "The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture," a precursor for one of his later books, The Higher Learning in America, for which he is said to have half-seriously suggested the subtitle, "A Study in Total Depravity." Heilbroner says he "summed up the perversion of centers of learning into centers of high-powered public relations and football in the most stinging commentary ever penned on the American university." During World War I, either out of patriotism or a lack of better options, he went to work for the federal government, where his memos recommending, for example, a steep tax on employers of domestic help in order to unleash labor power, were sometimes deemed "interesting" but never put into action. Galbraith calls him "the most penetrating, original and uninhibited source of social thought in his time" before concluding:
This did not mean that he was much honored or rewarded. Veblen's students and disciples frequently had to come to his support. Employment became harder to find than ever. In the mid-twenties, aging, silent, impecunious and tired, he returned reluctantly to California, and there, in 1929, he died.
Of local interest is the fact that, largely through the efforts of Galbraith, who complained to then-Governor Wendell Anderson that "only Scandinavians are so negligent of their heroes," the Veblen family farmstead near the town of Nerstrand is a National Historic Landmark.
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