On the life and work of the great rogue economist of the 20th century.
America in the spring of 1909 was, as usual, going to hell in a handbasket, and as usual, it was the professors who were swinging the basket by its strap. A journalist named Harold Bolce, writing for The Cosmopolitan Magazine on American institutions of higher learning pretty much gave the gist of it in a series of articles for the magazine. As he told it, in hundreds of classrooms around the country it was being taught daily that the Decalogue was no more sacred than a syllabus; that the home as an institution was doomed; that there were no absolute evils; that immorality was simply an act in contravention of society’s accepted standards; that democracy was a failure and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric; that the change from one religion to another was like getting a new hat. The academy was a slough of cultural relativity and the whole thing was really quite terrifying, according to the Cosmopolitan.
Veblen went beyond the warts and bumps on the surface of human behavior; he cut to the very bone.
Bolce had spent two years sitting in classrooms and interviewing professors and college administrators. The serious, thoughtful men—and one or two women—he listened to were able to espouse the most radical doctrines from the sanctity of the lectern. Yet somehow Bolce missed one of the worst of the worst, at once one of the most famous yet most reclusive of American scholars, who had been since 1907 living among the pines and cedars a mile from the Stanford campus.
This was Professor Thorstein Veblen. But anonymity was exactly what this quiet professor wanted, for his life, his very style of writing at this time, was one long parade of artifice, irony, and circumlocution, an elaborate mystification of who he really was and what he really believed. He was the most impossible of professors. His students found him an enigma—that is, the few who remained in his classes, for he usually seemed intent on having no students at all.
Eight years before he came to Stanford, this obscure professor had overnight become famous for a book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. His method was anthropological and the mode comic. The accoutrements of the conspicuously paraded leisure of the rich, as Veblen described them, had a meaning. They were signs. They were a language of difference and discrimination. Dogs and carriages, dresses and walking sticks—it was a grand American potlatch, a kind of plutocratic cakewalk of corsets and courtesies, of snubs and snobberies, of spaniels and jewels and privileges.
His method was anthropological and the mode comic.
At times it is hard work to immediately grasp the riot of scorn and rage that Veblen chose to camouflage under the verbal effusion which he chose to call a “morally colorless” language. After a while you discover under the elephantine, Oliver Hardy sort of tread of Veblen’s prose an epic hilarity, a satire more intense than anything H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain ever dreamed of, for Veblen went beyond the warts and bumps on the surface of human behavior; he cut to the very bone.
Claude Lévi-Strauss says that the function of anthropological thinking is to make the exotic ordinary; Veblen inverts this and makes the everyday trappings of the world of the rich as exotic as the paraphernalia of a barbarian chief.
Consider the walking stick.
Taken simply as a feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem at best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point in question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails—the classes with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension— are the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class delinquents. . . . The walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer’s hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity.
It is a wonderful passage. The walking stick is both an emblem of perfect leisure and a reminder of perfect ferocity: its symbolism makes brothers of J. P. Morgan and the most unregenerate pimp in your town’s Tenderloin.
So Veblen’s book goes on, a deadpan send-up of what he called the predatory class, of its propensity for violence and plunder. Veblen’s method is often stereoscopic. He discovers, for example, a certain moment in history where intense competition among companies was fast becoming intolerable, and describes how there arose a man to set things straight, “a man of far-seeing sagacity and settled principles, of executive ability and businesslike integrity, who saw the needs of the hour and the available remedy, and who saw at the same glance his own opportunity of gain.” Yet that man is not some nineteenth-century robber baron but a tenth-century Viking pirate: put Pálnatoki on one side of the card and John D. Rockefeller on the other; put the card in the stereopticon and adjust the focus: the pirate and plutocrat become moral equivalents of each other.
Against the prevailing Social Darwinism, Veblen reconstructed humanity’s earliest societies as egalitarian and cooperative, rather than competitive.
Against the prevailing Social Darwinism preached in the best churches and the most elite American universities, Veblen reconstructed humanity’s earliest societies as egalitarian and cooperative, rather than competitive. As a young man Veblen, with his first wife, Ellen Rolfe, read Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. It made, Ellen said, an epoch in their lives. The novel created a world without money and almost free of labor, where technology and systematized human goodness had triumphed over the grinding competition of capitalism.
Veblen outgrew the bland rationality of Bellamy’s insufferable Doctor Leete, but the book had given him that great gift of all literary utopias, a place outside history—if only imaginary—from which to evaluate society’s accepted truths. Darwin might be understood by one sort of reader, say Herbert Spencer, to show that nature itself was a form of cutthroat competition, the “survival of the fittest” in Spencer’s rephrasing of the process of natural selection, but Veblen did not think that was by any means the whole story, so he wound the skein back, looking for other evidence.
The most primitive instinct, beyond the sheer will to survive, was what he called the “Instinct of Workmanship,” which expressed itself in this hypothetical primitive world in a spirit of emulation, a peaceful competition to be the best practitioner of what Veblen named the “Industrial Pursuits”— the best basket maker, say, or wood-carver. But with the advance of technology came the ability to hunt and make war, and the useful industrial pursuits, now largely the work of women, became humiliating, tabooed. The warrior became the leader of this divided society; his predations were sung and praised, the new objects of competition and emulation. Finally, the skulls and scalps he accumulated, the women he stole, became uniquely his, a sign of his prowess and the origin of private property. It was only a few short steps from actual war to pecuniary competition and the sterile, wasteful, and finally socially useless battles of the robber barons.
Yet for all his many publications, it was often difficult for people to know what, exactly, Thorstein Veblen did believe, and he took pains to keep it so. The socialists liked to claim him, and indeed he once said he was surprised that they hadn’t made more use of his work. But if the socialists claimed him, he didn’t exactly claim them. He learned from Marx and held him up as one of the world’s great minds, yet he saw him as in reality only continuing the thinking of such English economists as Ricardo and Adam Smith. For Veblen found in all of them a teleological bias smuggled into their science, a kind of subjective magic he called animism. Marx’s view of history as class struggle was just another version of the Victorian myth of progress, his dialectic a leftover from the orgy of German Romanticism.
Veblen’s view of capitalism was unique, for unlike the classical economists and the Marxists, he did not hold it to be a necessary stage in historical development. He thought it might be a sort of moment and he did not respect it. He was nobody’s man. He liked to have it so. He read William James’s psychology with great care, but had no use for his pragmatism; he satirized the church and he quarreled with the academy. “The outcome of any serious research,” he said, “can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.” Other professors thought he wore a mask. He rarely spoke in public, rarely took the floor in a meeting. Perhaps it was the sin of intellectual pride.
This post was adapted from An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World by Zeese Papanikolas.
Start reading An American Cakewalk »
Zeese Papanikolas lives and works in Oakland, California. A former Stegner Fellow and long-time member of the Humanities Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, he is the author of several books including, most recently, Trickster in the Land of Dreams, American Silence, and An American Cakewalk.
Comments