VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (BUNDE)

born July 30, 1857, Manitowoc County, Wis., U.S. died Aug. 3, 1929, near Menlo Park, Calif. U.S. 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 phrasesconspicuous consumption, and pecuniary emulationthat are still widely used. Veblen was of Norwegian stock. He did not learn English until he went to school, and all his life he spoke it with an accent. He was graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in three years, proving himself a brilliant scholar and a mocking individualist given to railing at established ideas. He went on to Johns Hopkins and Yale to study philosophy, 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, writes his 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 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 a survival from 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, most of whom read it as a satire rather than as science, and Veblen soon had a reputation as a social critic extending far beyond his academic horizons. His reputation 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 ways 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 in 1906. After three years his personal affairs once more became an issue, and he was forced to resign again. With some difficulty he found a post as a lecturer at the University of Missouri, at a much lower salary, remaining 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 he 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 disposition to useful effort and that a large proportion of men's energies were wasted through inefficient institutions. The outbreak of World War I served to deepen Veblen's pessimism as to the prospects of the human race. In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), he suggested that Germany had an advantage over democratic states like England and France because its autocracy was able to channel more of the gains of modern technology into the service of the state. He added that the advantage was only temporary 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) he 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 less than five months. In the fall of 1918 he became a contributor to 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). While his prestige in the literary world had never been higher, Veblen's own life was going badly. His second wife had suffered a nervous collapse that was followed by her death in 1920. Veblen himself had largely 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 being 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 corporation 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, living with a stepdaughter in a cabin in the mountains overlooking the sea, where he died. Veblen's reputation reached its high point in the 1930s, when the economic depression appeared to many to be a vindication of his critical ideas about the business system. The reading public saw him as a political radical or a Socialist, although Veblen was a pessimist who never committed himself to any form of political action. Among economists he has had both admirers and critics, the latter more numerous. The scholarly analysis of modern industrial society owes much more to Veblen's German contemporary Max Weber, whose ideas are more complex than his. Even his closest disciples have found his anthropological and historical approach too sweeping to satisfy their scientific requirements, although they have admired his vast learning and his original insights. One of the most eminent of them, 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. Francis S. Pierce