Thorstein Veblen Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was a critic and satirist of U.S. economic society and its system of capitalism. An economist, social scientist, and social critic, he sought to apply the idea of evolution to the study of economic institutions in order to develop evolutionary economics. Both Darwinism and social Darwinism were fresh concepts during the period, and he applied them to economics, using them to present economic behavior as deterministic in a similar process to that of human evolution.

Veblen was born July 30, 1857, in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, to recently immigrated Norwegian parents. He grew up on a farm in a Norwegian farming community in Minnesota. He learned English after he went to school and always spoke it with a thick accent. He graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota, and in 1994, he completed a PhD at Yale University, where William Graham Sumner, the American champion of social Darwinism, directed Veblen’s doctoral work.

Unable to find an academic job, Veblen spent the next seven years at home reading. In 1888 he married Ellen Rolfe, the daughter of a wealthy business family. This was a rocky relationship that interrupted his teaching career several times and eventually ended in a divorce.

In 1891 Veblen returned to higher education. He entered Cornell University as a graduate student in order to be educated in something that could gain him employment. At Cornell, he greatly impressed one of his teachers, American economist J. Laurence Laughlin. Veblen subsequently went to the University of Chicago as a fellow in economics when Laughlin became the head of the economics department. Veblen’s first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was written while he was at the university. The book is both scholarly and satirical. In it Veblen criticizes what he believed were the false values of the wealthy upper classes, arguing that they were socially wasteful. His use of phrases such as “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary emulation” won him literary fame and a wide audience.

In 1904 Veblen published The Theory of the Business Enterprise, which was also written at the University of Chicago. Here, he uses evolutionary analysis to enable criticism of the capitalist system, which he predicted would be eliminated as economic conflict evolved into socialism. He also opposes business finance, which he finds to be irrational, but praises industrial production.

From 1911 until 1918, Veblen taught at the University of Missouri. He published several works during this period, including The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915; a favorite of the Progressives), and An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917).

The Engineers and the Price System (1921) was a series of articles that were first published in an economic journal, The Dial, during 1919. In Engineers, Veblen assigns the important task of building a new planned economy—one that would govern a wholesome society—to scientists and engineers.

Veblen died on August 3, 1929, near Menlo Park, California, on the eve of the Great Depression. This period marked the peak of his popularity, when he was most widely read for his understanding of the great economic crisis. His thought was used for reforming capitalism and not for adopting socialism, which he preferred.

Bibliography:

Lerner, Max, ed. The Portable Veblen. New York:Viking, 1976.
Patsouras, Louis. Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2004.
Spindler, Michael. Veblen and Modern American: Revolutionary Iconoclast. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

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