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Have read Veblen ?

2016-10-25T16:51:57Z

Outsider par excellence, who lived on the margins of both the academic world and "high society", Thorstein Veblen would not have wanted tributes or hagiographies written in his honor. The most fitting tribute would be to honor his iconoclastic mind, which is acknowledged even by those who are only vaguely familiar with his work.

Source : Wikimedia Commons

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) remains poorly known in the French speaking world, though there has been, over the past decade, a renewal of interest in his thought and work. Even in the United States, where he lived his whole life, he is one of those famous people that one doesn't know. Economic history textbooks refer to him somewhat perfunctorily as the founder of institutional economics. He is best known for his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), his critique of neoclassical economics, and his thoughts on the role of institutions.
Veblen was a sociologist as much as he was an economist : he believed that the economy was embedded in social institutions, thus disagreeing with his contemporaries, who were busy building fences around “pure” economics to protect it from other social sciences. It is this intellectual stance, which is both critical and interdisciplinary, to which we feel indebted and that which we wish to honor. It does not lock us into a school of thought or rigid tradition.
Beyond his work, there is, moreover, Veblen the man : an eternal outsider, an American son of Norwegian immigrants, torn between the small Lutheran farming community where he grew up and American society at large, from which he felt alienated. This “iconoclast par excellence” (as Gilles Dostaler puts it in the article below), who lived “on the margins of both the academic world and ‘high society,'” according to Raymond Aron [1], would not have wanted tributes or hagiographies written in his honor. The most fitting tribute would be to honor his iconoclastic mind, which is acknowledged even by those who are only vaguely familiar with his work.

The Institute

“Thorstein Veblen, Pioneer of Institutionalism”

Gilles Dostaler

This article originally appeared in the French monthly Alternatives Economiques n° 215 (June 2003). Reproduced with the kind permission of the editors and the author.

Veblen, a merciless detractor of his own society, laid the groundwork for an unorthodox critique of neoclassical thought.

Thorstein Veblen was an iconoclast par excellence. Both his life and work are noteworthy for their anti-conformism and dissidence. Born in 1857, he was raised an isolated Norwegian immigrant community in the United States. After defending a doctoral thesis inspired by Kant and Spencer, he retreated for seven years to the family farm, where he plunged into a sea of books that he devoured at a prodigious rate. Only at the age of 34 did he begin to earn his own living. His unusual behavior, his style of dress, his unorthodox teaching methods, his stormy relationships, and his overt hostility to religion complicated his academic career, which was punctuated by non-renewed contracts and stints of unemployment.

And yet even so, his colleagues recognized the value of an oeuvre that brilliantly combined trenchant sarcasm with original analysis while straddling economics, sociology, and history. In 1925, as he was nearing seventy, Veblen was offered the prestigious position of president of the American Economic Association—on the condition, that is, that he agreed to become a member ! True to himself, he declined the honor, adding that the offer should have been made when he needed it. The following year, he retired to a rustic cabin, full of furniture of his own making, on a hill along the Californian coast.

A Critic of Economic Theory

Veblen was not only a merciless and cutting critic of the society in which he lived, but also of the theories that claimed to explain this society, particularly economic theory. It was Veblen who coined the term “neoclassical economics” to emphasize that there was more continuity than discontinuity between classical political economic and the new school of marginalism. Veblen believed that, as often occurs with social thought, neoclassical theory had been outpaced by the society that it sought to explain. Abstract, deductive, and static, it was incapable of explaining economic growth and crises. It had closed itself off from other disciplines, like sociology and history, at the very moment when an interdisciplinary approach was needed to understand the evolution of society and its institutions. Neoclassical economics endorses a restrictive conception of human beings that is contradicted by biology, ethnology, and psychology. Homo economicus is a passive atom, a calculator of pleasure and pain, a “bundle of desires” that refers to no actual desire.

A critic of neoclassical economics, Veblen was equally opposed to Marxism, despite his apparent closeness to it. He reproached Marx, like his inspirer Hegel, for his deterministic conception of history. He considered the labor theory of value and the theory of surplus value to be inadequate for understanding industrial society in which machinery was playing an increasingly dominant role. Nor did he believe in class struggle as Marx conceived of it. He viewed the proletariat not as revolutionary, but as corrupted by the upper classes, whose values it assimilated and sought to imitate.

Instincts, Evolution, and Institutions

Far from being harmonious and balanced, society has, since its origins, been a site of conflict and domination. Human beings are not hedonistic and rational calculators but creatures of instinct and irrational impulses. These instincts evolve along with the changes that, beginning with primitive communities, ultimately lead to modern industrial society. One of the most important primitive impulses is the predatory instinct, which leads idle minorities to appropriate economic surpluses for themselves. It first appears in relations between men and women. Next, it pits a “leisure class,” dedicated to sport, religion, war, and government, against a laboring class. The predatory instinct is accompanied, in these instances, by a propensity for physical exploits and by a taste for war and sport. In modern society, this takes the form of financial competition, revealing itself in conspicuous consumption, leisure, and ostentatious waste. The higher one's social rank, the less one consumes in order to satisfy one's needs, and the more one consumes to display one's status, power, and wealth. These nefarious impulses are opposed the artisanal instinct or workmanship, a taste for gratuitous curiosity, and the parental instinct. The latter are the motors of economic, social, and scientific progress.

Veblen does not believe that these instincts are the exclusive property of a single social class. One finds them, in varying degrees, in all human beings. Even the poor, influenced by advertising and the example of their social superiors, indulge in leisure and conspicuous consumption.
As an admirer of Darwin, Veblen attributes a central place, in addition to instincts, to evolution and institutions in his vision of society. He defines institutions not as organizations, but as “prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular relations and particular functions of the individual and of the community” (Theory of the Leisure Class). They are customs, practices, rules of behavior, or juridical principles. Institutions thus have an important cultural dimension. They evolve by adapting to changing environments. But they lag, most of the time, behind scientific and technological progress. This lag is the primary cause of economic and social crises.

A Critic of Modern Economics

Veblen applies his dualistic approach to the study of the modern economy. The equivalent of the instinct of workmanship in the modern economy is industry. The modern equivalent of the predatory impulse is the business world. Industrial progress is tied to advances in science and technology. Modern industry is characterized in particular by the predominant role given to machinery. The purpose of industrial activity is to manufacture products that improve the population's wellbeing. In modern capitalism, however, production is organized by companies. The reason companies invest is financial gain, i.e. to make a profit. In other words, their goal is make money, not things.

Nothing guarantees that the interests of industry and business will coincide—quite the contrary. It can be just as profitable—even if it is antisocial—for a company to slow down production, to raise prices unnecessarily, to waste resources, or to produce useless or harmful products. There was a time, when capitalism was first emerging, when companies were run by genuine industrialists driven by workmen's instincts. Now, economic power is in the hands of a modern predator : the captains of industry and finance. Veblen is one of the first thinkers to describe the consequences of the separation of ownership and production in companies and the emergence of the “absentee ownership” that has emerged as the dominant form of postwar capitalism. Economic crises and unemployment are the result of the slowing-down of industry that capital ownership imposes on the price system. The expansion of credit and excessive stock-market capitalization create increasing discrepancies between capital that is real, productive, and tangible, and capital that is purely monetary and intangible.

The way out of this impasse, according to Veblen, is for the carriers of the instinct of workmanship, technicians and engineers, to seize control of industry in alliance with manual laborers. Yet he offered no explanation of such a “technicians' soviet” might work in practice. In the final years of his life, he grew more and more bitter and pessimistic about what he saw as the growing collusion between business, religion, and war. Were he to come back to life at present, he would, no doubt, feel completely at home !

Though relatively isolated at the time of his death, Veblen had two disciples, John R. Commons and Wesley C. Mitchell, who were the real founders of the institutionalist school of which he is considered the father. As the primary heretical opponents to neoclassical hegemony in the United States, institutionalism has assumed a variety of forms, some of them quite distinct from Veblen's own ideas. After having inspired Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Veblen's ideas went, during the postwar year, on a long journey through the wilderness. During the sixties, there was a major resurgence of interest in his thought, notably with the foundation of the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Gilles DOSTALER
Translated from French by Michael C. Behrent

Veblen's life

1857 : Born on June 30 in Cato, in the state of Wisconsin (US), to an immigrant farming family of Norwegian origin.
1880 : Graduates from Carleton College, Minnesota.
1881-1882 : Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
1884 : Receives his doctorate in philosophy from Yale University.
1884-1891 : Withdraws for seven years to the family farm.
1888 : Marriage to Ellen Rolfe.
1891 : Studies economics at Cornell University.
1892-1906 : Teaches at the University of Chicago, where he is an editorial assistant for the Journal of Political Economy.
1899 : The Theory of the Leisure Class.
1904 : The Theory of Business Enterprise.
1906-1909 : Teaches at Stanford University
1911 : Ellen Rolfe divorces him.
1911-1918 : Teaches at the University of Missouri.
1914 : The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of Industrial Arts. Marries Anne Bradley, who dies in 1920 after being institutionalized for mental illness.
1915 : Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.
1918 : Works for the Food Administration and serves on the editorial board of the progressive magazine The Dial. An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation.
1918 : The Higher Learning in America.
1919 : Participates in the founding of the New School of Social Research in New York, where he occasionally teaches until 1926. The Vested Interests and the Common Man. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays.
1921 : The Engineers and the Price System.
1923 : Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times.
1926 : Retires to Palo Alto, California.
1929 : Dies of heart illness on August 3.

Veblen's Work

– (1899). "The Preconceptions of Economic Science ; Part I". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 13.
– (1899). "The Preconceptions of Economic Science ; Part II". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 13.
– (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class - An Economic Study of Institutions. New York, Macmillan Company.
– (1900). "The Preconceptions of Economic Science ; Part III". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 14.
– (1904). The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons.
– (1914). The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York, Macmillan Company.
– (1918). The Higher Learning in America New York, BW Huebsch.
– (1919). The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York, BW Huebsch.
– (1921). The Engineers and the Price System. New York, BW Huebsch.
– (1923). Absentee Ownership : Business Enterprise in Recent Times : the Case of America, George Allen & Unwin London.
– (1994) The Collected Works of Thorstein Veblen, éd. Routledge, 10 vol.

On Veblen

– Bagwell, L. S. and B. D. Bernheim (1996). "Veblen Effects in a Theory of Conspicuous Consumption". American Economic Review 86(3) : 349-373.
– Campbell, C. (1995). "Conspicuous confusion ? A critique of Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption". Sociological Theory 13(1) : 37-47.
– Chase, S. (1934). Foreword to "The Theory of the Leisure Class". The Theory of the Leisure Class. T. Veblen, The Modern Libary INC.
– Cunningham Wood, J. (1993), Thorstein Veblen : Critical Assessments, Routledge, 3 vol.
– Day, A. M. (1901). "Review : The Theory of the Leisure Class". Political Science Quarterly XVI(2) : 366-369.
– Dorfman, J. (1934). Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York, The Viking Press.
– Edgell, S. (1992). "Veblen and post-Veblen Studies of Conspicious Consumption : Social Stratification and Fashion". Internationl Review of Sociology 3.
– Edgell, S. (1994), Veblen in Perspective : his Life and Thought, M.E. Sharpe.
– Harris, A. L. (1953). "Veblen as a Social Philosopher - A Reappraisal". Ethics - An International Journal of Social Political And Legal Philosophy 63(3).
– Jackson, T., W. Jager, et al. (2004). Beyond insatiability–needs theory, consumption and sustainability. The Ecological Economics of Consumption. I. Røpke and L. Reisch. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
– Keaney, M. (1999). "Review : Rick Tillman - The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen". Journal of Value Inquiry 33 : 131-134.
– Leibenstein, H. (1950). "Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand". Quarterly Journal of Economics 64(2) : 183-207.
– Mason, R. (1998). The Economics of Conspicuous Consumption. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
– Mason, R. S. (1981). Conspicuous consumption. Hampshire, Gower.
– Mayer, R. N. (1999). "Review : Roger Mason - The Economics of Conspicuous Consumption : Theory and Thought Since 1700". Financial Counseling and Planning 10 : 75-76.
– Mayhew, A. (2000). ""Review : Rick Tilman - The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen : Unresolved Issues". History of Political Economy 32(1) : 170-171.
– Mitchell, R. (2007a). Veblen, Innis, and the Classic Tradition : A North American Economic Sociology. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press : 133-160.
– Mitchell, R. (2007b). Absentee Ownership and Resource-Dependent Communities : Veblen and Beyond. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press : 287-314.
– Mitchell, R. E. (2001). "Thorstein Veblen : Pioneer in Environmental Sociology". Organization & Environment 14(4) : 389.
– Mitchell, R. E., Ed. (2007). Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology, Edwin Mellen Press.
– Perkin, H. (1972). "Review : Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class". The Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 25( 4) : 737.
– Plotkin, S. (2007). Animism and the Roots of a Veblenian Political Ecology. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press : 29-76.
– Plotkin, S. (2007). Animism and the Roots of a Veblenian Political Ecology. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press.
– Reinhart, E.S. and Lidia Viano, Francesca (2012), Thorstein Veblen. Economics for an Age of Crises, Anthem Press.
– Reynard, H. (1925). "Review : Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class". The Economic Journal 35(139) : 445-446.
– Samuels, W. J. (1990). "The Self-Referentiability of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Preconceptions of Economic Science". Journal of Economic Issues 24(3) : 695-718.
– Saram, P. A. (2007). Thorstein Veblen and the Natural World. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press : 77-102.
– Shove, E. and A. Warde (2002). "Inconspicuous Consumption : The Sociology of Consumption, Lifestyles, and the Environment". Sociological Theory and the Environment : Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights : 230–51.
– Steiner, R. and J. Weiss (1951). "Veblen Revised in the Light of Counter-Snobbery". Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9(3) : 263-268.
– Tilman, R. (1992). "The Social Theory and Contemporary Relevance of Thorstein Veblen". Internationl Review of Sociology 3.
– Tilman, R., Ed. (1993). A Veblen Treasury : From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism. New York, ME Sharpe, Inc.
– Tilman, R. (1996). The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen : Unresolved Issues, Greenwood Press.
– Tilman, R. (1997). "Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) : Sociologus Oeconomicus". International Sociology 12(1) : 93.
– Tilman, R. (2007). Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism, University of Missouri Press.
– Trigg, A. B. (2001). "Veblen, Bourdieu, and conspicuous consumption". Journal of Economic Issues 35(1) : 99-115.
– United Nations Development Programme (2006). Consumption from a Human Development Perspective. The Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Consumption. T. Jackson, Earthscan.
– Van Griethuysen, P. (2008). Why are we growth - addicted ? The hard way towards degrowth in the involutionary western development path. First international conference on Economic De-growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, Paris.
– Varul, M. Z. (2006). "Waste, Industry and Romantic Leisure : Veblen's Theory of Recognition". European Journal of Social Theory 9(1) : 103-117.
– Vinokur, Annie (1996). Thorstein Veblen et la tradition dissidente dans la pensée économique américaine, éd. Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence.
– Ward, L. F. (1900). "Review : The Theory of the Leisure Class". The American Journal of Sociology 5(6) : 829-837.
– Wasser, S. (2007). Implications for Political Ecology in Veblen. Thorstein Veblen's Contribution to Environmental Sociology. R. Mitchell, Edwin Mellen Press.

Veblen ressources online

In French : « Pertinences et impertinences de Thorstein Veblen : Héritage et nouvelles perspectives pour les sciences sociales », special feature appeared in the Canadian review Interventions économiques.

The Veblen Project

[1] « Avez-vous lu Veblen ? », (Have you read Veblen ?) R. Aron foreword to the French translation of the Theory of the Leisure Class (1970).

Board Members

2016-10-25T16:45:24Z

- Board Members

Our Mission Statement

2016-10-25T16:42:05Z

Placing the Ecological Transition at the Heart of Social and Economic Thought

The Veblen Institute strives for a sustainable society in which respect of our planet's physical limits goes hand in hand with well-being, social solidarity and an economy built upon more democratic rules than at present.

We believe that, as we enter the Anthropocene, humanity as a whole faces an unprecedented choice : transitionning to a different model while there is still time, or continuing to go down the same path as before, while awaiting the catastrophic consequences of resource shortages, reduced biodiversity, and climate change. We want to contribute to this decisive choice, upon which the well-being of present and future generations will depend. We want to do so at the level of ideas as well through public policy adivsing, by showing that it is possible to free our society from the model of unsustainable growth, that a change of course is not only necessary but also desirable, and that the “business as usual” scenario threatens our social wellbeing.

Such an approach to the ecological transition obviously involves a vast array of issues and fields of expertise. We focuse on economic issues, which we define in three ways :

First, we believe that economic thought is itself in need of renewal. Whether one likes it or not, policies developed in response to ecological risks make use of concepts and recommendations that are drawn from mainstream economic theory. The latter, however, is particularly ill-suited to this task. Due to its perceived legitimacy, which rests largely on its alleged scientific objectivity – an “objectivety” often claimed on the basis of a questionable use of mathematical tools –, mainstream economics represents a genuine intellectual obstacle on the road towards a sustainable society. To overcome it, we work closely with scholars who are developing alternative approaches, be it in the realm of modeling, macroeconomics, or wealth indicators.

Second, the ecological transition requires public policies which go far beyond a simple "greening" of the current system. To win the battle of ideas, we must be capable of defining the concrete adaptations of our current economical system. What employment policies would prepare us for a post-growth society ? What kind of purchasing power would they imply ? What monetary and financial system could contribute to it ? What new balance will be struck between the market, the state, and the commons as modes of producing and delivering goods and services ? What are new ways of consuming, producing, working, and living together ? What will be the role of social innovation and grassroot initiatives ?

It is by offering answers to these and other questions that one can shift from the stage of stirring speeches to that of organized political mobilization.

Third, proposals of this kind cannot dispense with the technical expertise of sectors involved : transportation, energy, agriculture, housing, production system, and so on. Our ambition is not to become specialists in each of these fields, but to master them sufficiently to understand their interdependencies and to know how to involve specialists in the work on policy proposals. This is essential to responding to the challenges identified in the previous point, but it is not the core of our activity.
The Veblen Institute's wager is that bridges can be built between three domains : academic thinking about the economy, public policy making, and sectoral technical expertise. In addition to building bridges at the level of thought, we also want to create bridges between various actors working at different levels. Many citizens share our vision of the ecological transition : scholars, experts, and authorities in civil society as well as politics. One of the Institute's main skills is its ability to work with all these actors without seeking to substitute itself for any, and to help bring forth a coherent vision, as opposed to the sectoral approaches and narrow expertise which still dominate the debate. To strengthen the transdisciplinary networks that emerge and to launch new ones, one must be able to work closely with very different professional cultures, without any pretense of being the “center” around which all the other actors gravitate.

Within these networks of actors working at different levels, most of the Institute's contribution can be found in the three approaches to economy defined above, in the idea a clearer and more coherent vision of transition policies will make it possible to mobilize the necessary political support. A central aspect of this “clarification” concerns the impact of the proposed policies on social wellbeing : which are the key components upon which a distinct political program could be formuleted ? But we also need a more fine-tuned articulation between top-down regulations and social innovations “from below”— citizens' initiatives, new forms of production and consumtion, and so forth.

Authors & Contributors

2016-09-20T09:10:45Z

- Authors & Contributors