Thorstein Bunde Veblen ( ;"Veblen". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Veblen laid the foundation for the perspective of institutional economics. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the US, Veblen attacked production for profit. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of fascism, capitalism, and technological determinism.
Biography Early life and family background Veblen was born on July 30, 1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American immigrant parents, Thomas Veblen and Kari Bunde. He was the sixth of twelve children.
His parents had emigrated from Valdres, Norway, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September 16, 1847, with few funds and no knowledge of English. They migrated to Milwaukee via Drammen, Hamburg and Quebec. The trip took four and a half months. Despite their limited circumstances as immigrants, Thomas Veblen's knowledge in carpentry and construction, paired with his wife's supportive perseverance, allowed them to establish a family farm in Rice County, Minnesota, where they moved in 1864.. (The Veblen farmstead, located near the town of Nerstrand, became a National Historic Landmark in 1981.) Kari Bunde was not formally trained as a physician, but she frequently provided medical treatment to surrounding areas.
Veblen began his schooling at age five. Although Norwegian was his first language, he learned English from neighbors and at school. His parents also learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their family on the farmstead. The family farm eventually grew more prosperous, allowing Veblen's parents to provide their children with formal education. Unlike most immigrant children of the time, Veblen and all of his siblings received training in lower schools and went on to receive higher education at nearby Carleton College. Veblen's sister, Emily, was reputedly the first daughter of Norwegian immigrants to graduate from an American college. The eldest Veblen child, Andrew Veblen, ultimately became a professor of physics at the University of Iowa and the father of one of America's leading mathematicians, Oswald Veblen of Princeton University.
Several commentators saw Veblen's ethnic-Norwegian background and his relative "isolation from American society" in Minnesota as essential to the understanding of his writings. Harvard University sociologist David Riesman maintained that Veblen's background as a child of immigrants meant that Veblen was alienated from his parents' original culture, but that his "living in a Norwegian society within America" made him unable to "assimilate and accept the available forms of Americanism" completely. According to Stanford University historian George M. Fredrickson (1959), the "Norwegian society" that Veblen lived in (Minnesota) was so "isolated" that when he left it "he was, in a sense, emigrating to America."
Education At age 17, in 1874, Veblen was sent to attend nearby Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Veblen's parents had him enrolled in hopes that he would become a Lutheran minister, but in later years he was dismissive of all "anthropomorphic cults" and identified as agnostic. Early in his schooling he demonstrated both the bitterness and the sense of humor that would characterize his later works. Veblen studied economics and philosophy under the guidance of the young John Bates Clark (1847–1938), who went on to become a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics. Clark influenced Veblen greatly, and as Clark initiated him into the formal study of economics, Veblen came to recognize the nature and limitations of hypothetical economics that would begin to shape his theories. Veblen later developed an interest in the social sciences, taking courses within the fields of philosophy, natural history, and classical philology. Within the realm of philosophy, the works of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) were of greatest interest to him, inspiring several preconceptions of socio-economics. In contrast, his studies in natural history and classical philology shaped his formal use of the disciplines of science and language respectively.
After Veblen graduated from Carleton in 1880, he traveled east to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns Hopkins he studied under Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). When he failed to obtain a scholarship there he moved on to Yale University, where he found economic support for his studies, obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy in 1884, with a major in philosophy and a minor in social studies. His dissertation was entitled Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution. At Yale, he studied under renowned academics such as philosopher Noah Porter (1811–1892) and sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910).
Marriages The two primary relationships that Veblen had were with his two wives. Despite a reputation to the contrary, there is little evidence that he had sexual liaisons with other women.
During his time at Carleton College, Veblen met his first wife, Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the college president. They married in 1888. While some scholars have blamed alleged womanizing tendencies for the couple's numerous separations and eventual divorce in 1911, others have speculated that the relationship's demise was rooted in Ellen's inability to bear children. Following her death in 1926, it was revealed that she had asked for her autopsy to be sent to Veblen, her ex-husband. The autopsy showed that Ellen's reproductive organs had not developed normally, and she had been unable to bear children. A book written by Veblen's stepdaughter asserted that "this explained her disinterest in a normal wifely relationship with Thorstein" and that he "treated her more like a sister, a loving sister, than a wife".
Veblen married Ann Bradley Bevans, a former student, in 1914 and became stepfather to her two daughters, Becky and Ann. For the most part, it appears that they had a happy marriage. Ann was described by her daughter as a suffragette, a socialist, and a staunch advocate of unions and workers' rights. A year after he married Ann, they were expecting a child together, but the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Veblen never had any children of his own.
Later life After his wife Ann's premature death in 1920, Veblen became active in the care of his stepdaughters. Becky went with him when he moved to California, looked after him there, and was with him at his death in August 1929. Prior to his death, Veblen had earned a comparatively high salary from the New School. Since he lived frugally, Veblen invested his money in California raisin vineyards and the stock market. However, after returning to northern California, Veblen lost the money he had invested and lived in a house on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park (that once belonged to his first wife). Earning $500 to $600 a year from royalties and a yearly sum of $500 sent by a former Chicago student, he lived there until his death in 1929.
Academic career After graduation from Yale in 1884, Veblen was essentially unemployed for seven years. Despite having strong letters of recommendation, he was unable to obtain a university position. It is possible that his dissertation research on "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution" (1884) was considered undesirable. However, this possibility can no longer be meaningfully evaluated because Veblen's dissertation has been missing from Yale since 1935. Apparently the only scholar who ever studied the dissertation was Joseph Dorfman, for his 1934 book Thorstein Veblen and His America. Dorfman says only that the dissertation, advised by evolutionary sociologist William Graham Sumner, studies such evolutionary thought as that of Herbert Spencer, as well as the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Also in 1884, Veblen wrote the first English-language study of Kant's third Critique, his Kant's Critique of Judgment, published in the July 1884 issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 174. Some historians have also speculated that this failure to obtain employment was partially due to prejudice against Norwegians, while others attribute this to the fact that most universities and administrators considered him insufficiently educated in Christianity. Most academics at the time held divinity degrees, which Veblen did not have. Also, it did not help that Veblen openly identified as an agnostic, which was highly uncommon for the time. As a result, Veblen returned to his family farm, a stay during which he had claimed to be recovering from malaria. He spent those years recovering and reading voraciously. It is suspected that these difficulties in beginning his academic career later inspired portions of his book The Higher Learning in America (1918), in which he claimed that true academic values were sacrificed by universities in favor of their own self-interest and profitability.
In 1891, Veblen left the farm to return to graduate school to study economics at Cornell University under the guidance of economics professor James Laurence Laughlin. With the help of Professor Laughlin, who was moving to the University of Chicago, Veblen became a fellow at that university in 1892. Throughout his stay, he did much of the editorial work associated with the Journal of Political Economy, one of the many academic journals created during this time at the University of Chicago. Veblen used the journal as an outlet for his writings. His writings also began to appear in other journals, such as the American Journal of Sociology, another journal at the university. While he was mostly a marginal figure at the University of Chicago, Veblen taught several classes there.
In 1899, Veblen published his first and best-known book, titled The Theory of the Leisure Class. This did not immediately improve Veblen's position at the University of Chicago. He requested a raise after the completion of his first book, but this was denied.
Veblen's students at Chicago considered his teaching "dreadful". Stanford students considered his teaching style "boring", but this was more excused than some of Veblen's personal affairs. He offended Victorian sentiments with extramarital affairs while at the University of Chicago. At Stanford in 1909, Veblen was ridiculed again for being a womanizer and an unfaithful husband. As a result, he was forced to resign from his position, which made it very difficult for him to find another academic position. One story claims that he was fired from Stanford after Jane Stanford sent him a telegram from Paris, having disapproved of Veblen's support of Chinese workers in California. (The fact that Jane Stanford was already dead by 1905, while Veblen was appointed in 1906, casts doubt on this story.)