Thorstein Veblen

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The economist behind conspicuous consumption.

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Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and social scientist who sought to apply an evolutionary, dynamic approach to the study of economic institutions. With The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) he won fame in literary circles, and, in describing the life of the wealthy, he coined phrases—conspicuous consumption and pecuniary emulation—that are still widely used.

Veblen was of Norwegian descent. He did not learn English until he went to school, and all of his life he spoke it with an accent. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in three years, proving himself a brilliant scholar and a mocking individualist given to railing at established ideas. He went on to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1884. Unable to find a teaching position, he returned to his father’s farm in Minnesota, where he spent most of the next seven years reading. “For days,” wrote one biographer, “all that one could see of him was the top of his head at the garret window.”

In 1888 he married Ellen Rolfe, a member of a wealthy and influential family. Still unable to find a job, he entered Cornell University in 1891 as a graduate student. There he impressed J. Laurence Laughlin so highly that, when Laughlin was asked to head the economics department at the new University of Chicago in 1892, he took Veblen with him as a fellow in economics. Not until 1896, when Veblen was 39, did he attain the rank of instructor.

His first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, subtitled An Economic Study of Institutions, was published in 1899. Still read today, it represents the essence of most of his thinking. Veblen sought to apply Darwin’s evolutionism to the study of modern economic life. The industrial system, he wrote, required men to be diligent, efficient, and cooperative, while those who ruled the business world were concerned with making money and displaying their wealth; their outlook was survivalist, a remnant of a predatory, barbarian past.

Veblen examined with obvious relish the “modern survivals of prowess” in the amusements, fashions, sports, religion, and aesthetic tastes of the ruling class. The book caught the interest of the literary world, where it was read as satire rather than as science and thereby earned Veblen a reputation as a social critic that extended far beyond his academic horizon.

His reputation, however, did not bring him academic success. He was an indifferent teacher with only contempt for the university ritual of lecture and examination. His most famous course, “Economic Factors in Civilization,” ranged over vast fields of history, law, anthropology, and philosophy but paid little attention to orthodox economic theory. In 1904 he published The Theory of Business Enterprise, in which he expanded on his evolutionary theme of the incompatibility between the modern industrial process and the irrational means of business and finance (i.e., on the difference between making goods and making money).

At Chicago Veblen attained only the rank of assistant professor, and he was forced to leave after being charged with marital infidelity. He was appointed to an associate professorship at Stanford University in 1906. After three years his personal affairs once more became an issue, and he was forced to resign again.

With some difficulty Veblen found a post as a lecturer at the University of Missouri, at a much lower salary, and he remained there from 1911 until 1918. He was divorced by Ellen Rolfe and in 1914 married Anne Fessenden Bradley, a divorcee whom he had known for some years. She had two daughters, whom she brought up according to Veblen’s utilitarian ideas as expressed in The Theory of the Leisure Class.

At Missouri Veblen enjoyed a productive period. In The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), he elaborated on his idea that business enterprise was in fundamental conflict with the human propensity for useful effort; too much of humankind’s energy was wasted through inefficient institutions. The outbreak of World War I deepened Veblen’s pessimism for the prospects of the human race. In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), he suggested that Germany had an advantage over democratic states such as the United Kingdom and France because its autocracy was better able to channel the gains of modern technology toward the service of the state. He conceded that the advantage was only temporary, however, because the German economy would eventually develop its own system of conspicuous waste. With An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917), Veblen acquired an international following. He maintained that modern wars were caused mainly by the competitive demands of national business interests and that an enduring peace could be had only at the expense of “the rights of ownership, and of the price system in which these rights take effect.”

In February 1918 he took a job with the Food Administration in Washington, D.C., but his approach to economic problems was of no use to government administrators, and he remained in the post less than five months. In the fall of 1918 he joined the editorial staff of The Dial, a literary and political magazine in New York, for which he wrote a series of articles on “The Modern Point of View and the New Order,” later published in book form as The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919; republished as The Vested Interests and the Common Man: The Modern Point of View and the New Order). Another series of articles that appeared in The Dial was later published in the book The Engineers and the Price System (1921). In these pieces Veblen developed his ideas for reform of the economic system. He believed that engineers, who had the knowledge to run industry, should take over its direction because they would manage it for efficiency instead of profit. This theme was central to the brief Depression-era movement known as “technocracy.”

At a time when his prestige in the literary world had reached new heights, Veblen’s own life was going badly. He left The Dial after one year. His second wife had suffered a nervous collapse that was followed by her death in 1920. Veblen himself largely had to be looked after by a few devoted friends and appeared to be psychologically incapable of conversing with strangers interested in his ideas. For a while he lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City, his salary supported by a subsidy from a former student. His last book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923), was an ill-written and repetitious examination of corporate finance, in which he stressed again the contradiction between the industrial arts and business enterprise.

In 1926 he gave up teaching and returned to California, where he lived with a stepdaughter in a cabin in the mountains overlooking the sea. He remained there until the end of his life.

Veblen’s reputation reached another high point in the 1930s, when the economic depression appeared to many to vindicate his criticisms of the business system. Although the reading public saw him as a political radical or socialist, Veblen was a pessimist who never committed himself to any form of political action. Among economists he has had both admirers and critics, but more of the latter. The scholarly analysis of modern industrial society owes much more to Veblen’s German contemporary Max Weber, whose ideas are more complex than Veblen’s. Even his closest disciples found his anthropological and historical approach too sweeping to satisfy their scientific requirements, though they admired his vast learning and original insights. One of his most eminent admirers, Wesley C. Mitchell, called him “a visitor from another world,” saying, “No other such emancipator of the mind from the subtle tyranny of circumstance has been known in social science, and no other such enlarger of the realm of inquiry.”

In addition to the works cited above, Veblen’s books include: The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918); The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays (1919); The Engineers and the Price System (1921); The Laxdaela Saga, trans. from the Icelandic (1925); and Essays in Our Changing Order, ed. by Leon Ardzrooni (1934), a posthumous collection from periodicals.

Much has been written about Veblen. The basic source for students of Veblen is Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934), available in many later printings with some corrections and new material. The best short introduction to Veblen’s ideas is Wesley C. Mitchell, “Thorstein Veblen,” in What Veblen Taught: Selected Writings of Thorstein Veblen (1936, reprinted 1964). For students of economics a good appraisal is J.M. Clark’s obituary of Veblen, American Economic Review, 19:742–745 (1929). A general approach is David Riesman, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953, reissued 1995). Veblen’s place in intellectual history is depicted in Morton White, Social Thought in America (1949), also published with a new preface and an epilogue (1957, reissued 1976), an analysis of the leading ideas of Veblen and some of his contemporaries. Douglas F. Dowd (ed.), Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal (1958, reprinted 1977), is a collection of essays commemorating the 100th anniversary of Veblen’s birth. A useful book is Max Lerner (ed.), The Portable Veblen (1948, reissued 1976). John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (1978), is a later reassessment of his thought.