Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

(1857-1929)

A leading social critic of American industrialism, whose writings inspired so-called institutional economics, and influenced figures such as John Kenneth Galbraith and C. Wright Mills. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen held several university posts, but his formal career was ruined by his outspoken and unconventional behaviour. His often eccentric writings are full of bitter satire and heavy irony and, arguably, their quality eventually suffered from his personal disappointments.

Veblen took the principal ideologies of late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism , in particular evolutionism and price theory, and turned them back on the society in which they flourished. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) he drew on fashionable evolutionary anthropology, comparing the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure (see leisure class ) of the financially successful classes with the display rituals of ‘barbarians’ in tribal societies. He showed himself acutely aware of the ‘barbarian’ status of women and their continued exploitation by men in ‘civilized’ societies. In The Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904), and in numerous articles criticizing neo-classical price theories, he developed a systematic account of how the mechanism of the market in reality engenders waste, fraud, and the exploitation of the industry and inventiveness of the worker. His notion of ‘pecuniary business interests’ may, in some ways, be compared with the concept of finance capital developed by his Marxist contemporary Rudolf Hilferding. However, Veblen himself rejected the utopian character of Marxism, and at one time pinned his political hopes on a version of technicism . That Veblen, though unfashionable, remains important is attested to by the fact that many of his ideas and concepts have become commonplace in the social sciences.