Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929)

U.S. economist

Thorstein Veblen, who staked out his own unique intellectual and thematic territory in U.S. social thought, was born in Wisconsin to Norwegian parents and spent his childhood and early adult years in the hard-bitten life on a Minnesota farm. It is said that English was his second language, a claim that some scholars who have struggled with his prose would find believable. His professional life was in academia; he taught at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the New School for Social Research in New York City. He gained a reputation for crustiness, but he also had a highly admirable loathing of the grading system.

Veblen's combination of economics, sociology, and anthropology rested on the assumption that human beings, even entrepreneurs and financiers, do not act out of pure hedonistic pursuit of profit and an aversion to loss, as classical economics assumes. He believed people are driven instead by desires and ambitions that find varying expression in accordance with the culture in which they are born. The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, examines in sardonic detail the efforts of the nouveau riche (“newly rich”) to demonstrate just how much wealth they can blithely waste—“conspicuous consumption,” in the author's famous phrase. The study is Veblen's best-known writing. But for the topic at hand, his concept of community, a reader needs to look elsewhere, particularly in The Instinct of Workmanship, which was published in 1914.

Veblen's studies define a number of instincts, as he called them, the most significant for the building of community being the parental instinct and the instinct of workmanship. Both, he assumed, had flourished in a primitively satisfactory way before the coming of barbarism, which despises the peaceableness of productive, nurturing village life and instead celebrates war and dominion. Veblen's newly rich seem to be latter-day embodiments of the barbarian stage. But after passing through an era of refined but flawed artisan production preceding the Industrial Revolution, the instinct of workmanship was emerging afresh in its finest form, in the discipline of machine technology.

In Veblen's view, recent civilization has been very demanding in its requirements for exact measurement and dispassionate submission to the demands of the modern professions. But rather than condemn the discipline of the machine on the grounds that crafts romantics would condemn it, for depriving the artisan of the play of imagination and manual skills, Veblen finds significant aesthetic and moral value in the exactitude of mechanization.

Veblen's community, as he imagined it, would be an international peaceable army of technicians, machinists, and factory workers—anyone, in fact, who can negotiate the particular demands of modern living. Its leadership, he hoped, would come from a class of engineers and others who relish good production and wish to exercise it for social well-being. The foe to overcome would be the business class. According to Veblen, business leaders expect to profit not from the smooth performance of productivity, but from the disruptions that will benefit some interests while others suffer. Nor is business equipped by temperament to understand technology. [Page 1444]Relying on the tricks and obscurities of salesmanship, its members lack the taste for exactness that inspires devotees of workmanship. As for the barbarian warrior leaders, Veblen predicted that in time workers across national lines would simply refuse to pay attention to them, indifferent to what national flag the barbarian plants on conquered territory.

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