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The Social and Psychological Setting of Veblen's Economic Theory*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
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In Veblen's own critique of other economists—andtion of his theory is just that—he relied securely on quasi-Marxist a major por-simplicities concerning causation. Other economists “got that way” because they were members of or sycophants of the kept classes, aristocratically disdainful of the actualities of production. Their theories, if they were classicists, were “superstructural” in the sense of being both above and behind the battle, for Veblen was one of the pioneers in the use of the culturallag concept which has done so much to confuse the understanding of the relations between technology and society. If they were American classicists, such as (in Veblen's view) J. B. Clark, diey were likely to couple a pallid reformism with their “fine-spun technicalities,” offering palliatives at the level of pecuniary theory for evils rooted in the very divorce of the pecuniary culture from its industrial base. And this reformism Veblen saw as a leisure-class product, along with female philanthropy, the arts and crafts movement, social work, and vegetarianism—the archaic by-products of the sheltered life of the better-off and the better-educated strata whose menial and hence life-giving work was done for them by others. Reformism was archaic because it was pre-evolutionary, pre-Darwinian; for Veblen, “A.D.” meant “After Darwin.” His emphasis on the datedness of economic theory—a charge to which Americans are especially sensitive since we like to be progressive and up-to-date—led Veblen to express recurrent hopes for the “younger generation” of economists, whom he wanted to make less literate and theoretical, less parasitic and less sanguine, less refined and more machine-minded. For Veblen as for Rousseau, what was young was less likely to be corrupted and spoiled.
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References
1 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953) 1 chaps, i and iiGoogle Scholar.
2 Quoted in Blegen, Theodore, Grass Roots History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1947), p. 113Google Scholar.
3 The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), P. 93Google Scholar.
4 A genealogy of the Veblen family indicates that most of Thorstein's siblings married other Norwegian-Americans (judging from names, and the names given children) and apparently remained in rural areas; one brother, and his favorite nephew Oswald, entered academic life. Only in the next generation would there appear to have been widespread assimilation to American middle-class norms.
5 One of Ours (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1922), p. 102Google Scholar.
8 To be sure, in Veblen's America economics was still often taught by divines and other amateurs, but Veblen, a gifted linguist, was familiar with the work being done on the Continent. On coming to Chicago, he translated Ferdinand Lassalle's polemical Science and the Workingman, and in the Journal of Political Economy he reviewed scholarly as well as socialist European economic literature. These reviews-some of them reprinted in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (New York: Viking Press, 1919)-exhibit Veblen's skill in handling complex Marshallian types of argument in economic theory.
7 Neither Veblen's idealized engineer nor his footloose Wobbly hero has much in common with the masterful, muscular hero of London's, JackThe Iron Heel (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917)Google Scholar. During the First World War, Veblen, though ferociously anti-German, was concerned about how international scholarship might be preserved through American aid, In this man of multiple and wavering identities, a concern for scholarship and especially economics -if not for particular scholars and economists-remained an abiding concern even when he became a “left-wing” journalist on The Dial.
8 “On the Nature of Capital,” in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, p. 339.
9 I have relied heavily, for information on Veblen's life and times, on Dorfman, Joseph, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking Press, 1934)Google Scholar. I am also indebted to a conversation with Professor Max Fisch concerning Veblen and Peirce. Since my address was written, an interesting essay has appeared comparing Veblen and William James: Feuer, Lewis, “Thorstein Veblen: the Metaphysics of the Interned Immigrant,” American Quarterly, V (1953), 99–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Feuer, somewhat less sympathetic to James and more to Veblen than I am, stresses that Veblen was too close to a precarious personal existence to afford James's middle-class optimism about the human will.
10 “The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and his Followers: II,” in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, pp. 436–37.
11 After the meeting, Mrs. Edna Macmahon of Vassar College told me the following incident, which occurred when she was a student of Veblen's: After a New School lecture, a pretty girl (a species usually able to overcome Veblen's defenses) presented Veblen with a gold clasp to substitute for the safety pin with which he attached his pocket watch to his clothes. Veblen declared, pulling out his pin, that it had true beauty, which he would not exchange for anything; that it could be bought at any five and ten, six for five cents'; that the pin did not damage his clothes; finally, that if the girl could not grasp the functional aesthetics of the pin, she had learned nothing from the course!
12 For this judgment, I was gently chided by Professor Willson Coates of the University of Rochester and others who felt that to criticize Veblen in terms of developments since his time was unjust. The problem, of course, would not arise had Veblen not sought to transcend his times,, both critically and prophetically; indeed, were he not to some degree original, there would be no point in seeking to understand him as an individual rather than simply as a type. It may well be that I expect top much illumination from Veblen, of a sort he is not equipped to give, and in this paper stress insufficiently his accomplishments. However, since many still move in evaluating contemporary America within the ambit of Veblen's rhetoric, it is important to emphasize that Veblen's America, to the extent it ever existed, predeceased him -while, to name a profounder guide, Tocqueville's America is in some ways more ours than his.