Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963: Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives
380
Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963: Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives
380Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691604602 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #212 |
| Pages: | 380 |
| Sales rank: | 692,489 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891â?"1963
Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives
By Rick Tilman
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04286-2
CHAPTER 1
VEBLEN: THE MAN AND HIS CRITICS
Biography
The critical writing on Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) that began to appear around the turn of the twentieth century continues unabated up to the present time. Although critics and commentators disagree about the significance of his work, interest in Veblen has not declined. Mostly reared in Scandinavian-Lutheran communities in the Midwest, he was the fourth son of Norwegian immigrant farmers who raised a large family, most of whom received higher education. Several of the Veblen children went to Carleton College in Minnesota; there Thorstein obtained his training in economics and philosophy under John Bates Clark, who later became a prominent American economist. After receiving his bachelor's degree at Carleton, Veblen went to Johns Hopkins for graduate study. After a short stay, he transferred to Yale, where he obtained his doctorate in philosophy and economics in 1884 while studying under such eminent academics as Noah Porter and William Graham Sumner.
He was then unemployed for seven years, most of which was spent on the farms of relatives or in-laws in the Midwest. Veblen's agnosticism made him unacceptable to schools with religious affiliations and he had not yet established a reputation in economics. Finally, in 1891 he obtained a graduate position at Cornell University, where he once again became a Ph.D. candidate. The economist A. Laurence Laughlin was impressed by him and in 1892, when Laughlin moved to the newly founded University of Chicago, took Veblen with him. Veblen soon became managing editor of the Journal of Political Economy and began publishing in the field of economics. In 1899 his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, appeared and achieved a fame all its own. But Veblen's personal idiosyncracies and his failure to properly "advertise" the university angered the administration at Chicago and he had to leave. His next job was at Stanford where he encountered similar difficulties that were exacerbated by his "womanizing." He was forced to move again, this time to the University of Missouri.
World War I found Veblen briefly in Washington as an employee of the Food Administration. At the end of the war, he served for a short time as one of the editors of the Dial, a journal of literary and political opinion, and on the faculty of the recently founded New School for Social Research in New York City. By then, even though his reputation as an original thinker had reached its peak, his academic career was at an end. Veblen retired and moved to California, near Stanford, where he lived an isolated existence in an old house in the hills. He died in August 1929, shordy before the start of the depression.
Veblen the Man
Thorstein Veblen's reputation as a seminal thinker in economics and sociology is well established thanks in part to the massive study of him by Joseph Dorfman. Dorfman gave an able analysis of Veblen's economics and sociology even if he failed to offer a clear or consistent portrayal of him as a human being. Veblen scholars owe Dorfman a serious debt, but the lacunae left by him as regards Veblen's personal traits and temperament can be filled in part by using materials not available between 1926 and 1934 when he wrote Thorstein Veblen and His America. Future biographers of Veblen may want to revise Dorfman's conclusions regarding Veblen's acquisition of English, the cultural and social isolation of the Veblen family, and its material circumstances when he was young. In any case, readers interested in Veblen's biography are referred to Dorfman's writings on him even though Dorfman is not always a reliable source of information as regards his childhood and adolescence.
Perhaps the most authoritative criticism of Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America came from Andrew Veblen (1848–1933), Thorstein's older brother, professor of mathematics, and father of Oswald Veblen, the eminent American mathematician. The older VebIen had corresponded with Dorfinan while he was writing his magnus opus and read drafts of it before it was published. He could see little virtue in them and believed that they included several fundamental misinterpretations of his brother's life. Andrew was particularly incensed at Dorfman's claims that Thorstein only learned English well when he was an adult. In a letter to Dorfman written in 1930, Veblen commented that
Thorstein had English-speaking playmates as early as he could toddle 1/8 of a mile to the nearest neighbor; and before that the neighbor's children were daily at our house or in the yard. His four older brothers and sisters knew and spoke English, with these other children, and more and more between themselves. Thorstein was sent to school before he filled five years. He had a bilingual training in speech, from the start. When he came to Carleton he spoke as correct and idiomatic English as any of the young people he encountered, and his rhetoricals, (not oratoricals) at once attracted attention for his facility in the use of idiomatic English.
However, Andrew Veblen told Dorfman that the myth that he knew no English until he was an adult may have been cultivated by Thorstein for reasons of his own. But he concluded that
if you still believe these stories of his ignorance of English, all I can say is that you do not lack company in your willing credulity. If he actually succeeded in carrying off such a process of deceit and delusion it is another tribute to his cleverness. I do not know why I should waste any more words on this myth about his ignorance of English, when as a matter of fact he was better equipped than any of his schoolmates and even some of the instructors.
Veblen's older brother also believed that Dorfman greatly exaggerated the cultural isolation of the Norwegian settlement in which the Veblen family lived and pointed to the fact that many of their neighbors and acquaintances were of Yankee origin and still others were Catholics. It is also interesting to note that many of the Veblen siblings married individuals of British ethnic origin. It appears, then, that Veblen's idiosyncratic personality and ideas had sources other than the social marginality induced by living in an ethnic Norwegian environment.
Both of Veblen's marriages were to women who either were or became mentally or emotionally ill. Of course, much is made of Veblen's "womanizing," but insufficient attention is paid to the mental state of his wives as a plausible explanation of this. Andrew Veblen wrote of his first wife that
she was interested in a theosophical establishment, the headquarters of which I understood was situated at Halcyon. This was a branch of the cult of theosophy, which consisted of followers of Madame Blavatsky.... she was much absorbed in spiritual-religious matters and problems.
Although Veblen divorced Ellen Rolfe Veblen in 1911, they apparently corresponded for many years thereafter. Only one letter has survived, but it is quite revealing of her state of mind:
Think of all that has happened in our lifetime! The Bahai Movement, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Darwin, Spencer, Shaw, Mills, James, Edmund Carpenter, Ghandi, Blavatsky, Healers of all sorts, the upheaval of the nation, Bolshevism, Karl Marx, the world war in progress [unintelligible], radio, art, and, as I hear, a new ray which renders metal permanently hot. Then, also, the oscilloscope.
History does not record Veblen's reaction to this bizarre juxtaposition of ideas, thinkers, religious movements, and inventions, but the quotation, from a letter written in 1920, does provide insight into his former wife's mind-set and emotional state.
Veblen's second wife, Ann Fessenden Bradley, a former student whom he married in 1914, had to be committed to Maclean Hospital, a mental asylum, in 1919. Her brother-in-law, Wallace Atwood, president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, told Veblen after a visit with Mrs. Veblen that
her mind of course wanders far afield, but the fact that it doesn't linger long on any one particular illusion, but flits about from one to another, is to me quite encouraging. She is quite conscious of her own behavior, and that also is encouraging to me. She knows that she gets overexcited and knows what she does at those times.
That university administrators used Veblen's dalliances with women as a reason for firing him is beyond doubt. Evidence of this is provided in a sanctimonious message written by the president of Stanford to the president of the University of Chicago. In a letter marked "confidential," David Starr Jordan told Henry Pratt Judson that
I have been able, with the help of Mrs. Veblen, to find out the truth in detail as to Professor Veblen's relations. He seems unable to resist the "femme mecomprise." It is fair to say, that in my final talk with him, he [indecipherable] behaved in manly fashion, with no attempt at denial or evasion. He has tendered his resignation to later effect at my discretion. This will probably mean with July of next year. For the University cannot condone these matters, much as its officials may feel compassion for the individual.
Clearly, Veblen's philandering was offensive to academic administrators. Yet the truth about his several dismissals from academic posts is more complex, for his ideological leanings also influenced administrators against him. Interestingly, however, President Jordan's later correspondence with Veblen indicates that he still read and admired Veblen's work and bore him no personal ill will.
Perhaps the most focused analysis of Veblen the man came from Jacob Warshaw, professor of romance languages at the University of Missouri, who came to know him well during his seven-year stay in Columbia. Warshaw read Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America when it was published in 1934. He believed that while it mostly did justice to Veblen's sociology and economics, it failed to adequately capture some of his basic personality traits. The following reflections are based on his acquaintance with Veblen when the latter was in his midto late fifties.
Though I always felt sorry for Veblen as a misunderstood man and a man of sorrows—if he had known of my compassion he would have withered me with a look—I never thought of him as, in his heart, the suave, imperturbable, sphinx-like character who stands out in Dorfman. He struck me rather as a man of spontaneous passions who had found it not the easiest task in the world to keep smiling and to say nothing.
The only scholarly portrait of Veblen based on primary sources available to us is the Dorfman book. All commentaries on his personality made by other Veblen scholars are from this source and are thus derivative. Obviously, Warshaw knew Veblen far better than Dorfman, so his commentaries on the man and on Dorfman's study of him are an invaluable source of information. Up to this time, the thirteen-page Warshaw sketch has rarely been used, but it is likely that some future revisionist biographer of Veblen will systematically exploit it. However, the significant point is that at least one of Veblen's contemporaries saw him differently than he is portrayed in Dorfman.
The general impression that I get from Dorfman is that Veblen was a quiet, suave, passionless person who broke loose only once or twice in his life and never laughed. Had I not known Veblen pretty well that would have been my picture of him out of Dorfman. My recollections, however, are different. Veblen could get as irritated as the next man and gave signs of his irritation.... He once gave me a dirty look when I declined one of his Russian cigarettes on the ground that my stomach was out of whack and that I thought I was losing weight through smoking too much.... If you didn't appreciate a joke of his, a frown would form on his face or his eyes would take on a somber look.
For those who remain convinced of the value of psychobiography in explaining the relationship between personality and theory, Warshaw's analysis of Dorfman's Veblen is more penetrating than either Dorfman's or David Riesman's study, although the latter relied heavily on Dorfman for information regarding Veblen. In perhaps Warshaw's most discerning comments he wrote
The point that I would make is that, under the surface, Veblen was highly emotional. His philanderings with women are one indication. His constant, bitter irony and sarcasm—which are good exhaust valves when you are inhibited from doing bodily damage—may be regarded as another. To realize this emotional quality in Veblen is, it seems to me, to get another light on his ideas and projects, to forgive him most of his cynicism, and to find him a more sympathetic and human individual than he is usually credited with being. He was never a cold-blooded, calculating radical—at least, so it appears to me."
Veblen's sense of humor and the emotional structure it provides evidence of were not adequately expressed in his sardonic scholarly posture. The bitter cynicism and sarcasm noted by Doriman that found its outlet in his theories was only one part of his temperament. Warshaw pointed to another aspect of it:
As for his ability to smile and laugh, I can say that I never found him markedly lacking in it. At 911 Lowry Street, where he was to a certain extent in the public gaze, his smile was somewhat pinched and guarded, but in our rambles over the golf links it was frequent, natural, and infectious. In fact, his smile is one of the features that I best remember him by. It was a kindly, amused, rather Olympian smile, and thoroughly genuine. I have also heard him laugh—not once, but a number of times.
Dorfman treated Veblen essentially as a social scientist and satirist whose main interests were the social order, the government, and the economy. But Warshaw discerningly portrayed the humanist in him that might be expected of a scholar of Romance languages and literature.
Few of the readers of Dorfaian will realize after they have finished the book that they have been reviewing the life of one of the most learned and most curious of latter-day humanists. By "humanist" I mean in this case "a lover of learning" and not merely "a lover of polite learning or the humanities," as was true during the Renaissance.... It is this insatiable curiosity and this accumulation of all kinds of knowledge that I should call Veblen's humanism. There was probably a limit to the stock of knowledge that he could hold and manipulate, but I never saw it reached. He would have been in his glory among the Renaissance humanists or the eighteenth-century encyclopedists.
Since Warshaw was an accomplished linguist in his own right, his comments on Veblen are significant and provide still another link with his humanism.
As a linguist alone, Veblen was unusual. Among students the legend ran that he knew twenty-six languages. The combination of languages that he could handle was somewhat uncommon, It included, along with the classics and the more widely known modern languages, Spanish, Dutch, and the Scandinavian tongues, including Icelandic. I do not doubt that Veblen had a working knowledge of other languages not usually studied and that he was capable, in an incredibly short time, of "getting up" in any language that he was interested in or had need of. His accomplishments in French, Spanish, and Italian I can vouch for. Whether or not he could speak them I can't be sure. But he surprised me frequently with his familiarity with minutiae of the Romance literatures and once or twice with his shrewd analyses of the history of Romance words. I did not know at the time that he had once had ambitions of becoming a philologist.
Warshaw was also an observer of Veblen's personal idiosyncracies and these oddities shed light not only on his personal tastes, but on his capacity for absorbing and assimilating knowledge. Warshaw interpreted them this way:
He preferred not to have anybody read his newspaper over his shoulder. That may have been due either to his abnormal personal sensitiveness or to his faculty, mentioned several times to me by one of his close Mends, of being able to read two columns of print simultaneously—a circumstance that would keep him and the onlooker woefully out of step.
The last claim, that Veblen could read two columns of print simultaneously, if true, may shed light on how it was that he was able to master such an extraordinary amount of printed material.
Warshaw also knew the personal side of Veblen from the perspective of one who had enjoyed the hospitality of the Veblen home, an opportunity of which few could boast.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891â?"1963 by Rick Tilman. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ForewordPreface
Acknowledgments
Ch. 1 Veblen: The Man and His Critics
Ch. 2 Conservative Critics: The Early Period
Ch. 3 Conservative Critics: The Chicagoites
Ch. 4 Conservative Critics: The Religious Assault
Ch. 5 Liberal Critics: The Progressives
Ch. 6 Liberal Critics: The Institutionalists
Ch. 7 Liberal Critics: The Neoinstitutionalists
Ch. 8 Liberal Critics: Harvard and Columbia Style
Ch. 9 Radical Critics: The Frankfurt School
Ch. 10 Radical Critics: The Monthly Review
Ch. 11 Radical Critics: Marxism, Trotskyism, and Social Democracy
Ch. 12 The Ideological Use and Abuse of Thorstein Veblen
Notes
Archives Consulted
Index