A New Assessment Of Veblenian Economics

138 articles are arranged thematically to give easy access to the intellectual processes of this influencial economist. Volume 1 deals with his life and perspectives, volume 2 with "political economy" and volume 3 on "Specialized topics

After his death Thorstein Veblen was hailed as ‘America’s Darwin and Marx’ and is normally portrayed as the perennial iconoclast. He severely criticised traditional economics and attempted to create an alternative approach based on a much more complex view of human beings. He is one of the most celebrated economists of our age and has been the inspiration for many books; the predatory version of capitalism we now again experience, the phenomenon of studying cultures of consumption and the darker sides of gilded ages can be traced back to Veblen. A conference in Veblen’s ancestral Norway marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. The aim of the conference was to consolidate Veblen scholarship and evaluate his relevance for the problems of today. This collection offers the results of that endeavour; it is a milestone of Vebleniana which assesses all the most salient aspects of his life and influence. Many of its contributors also push into uncharted territory, examining the man and his work from new and necessary perspectives hitherto ignored by scholarship.

'Fascination with the economics of Thorstein Veblen is today no less than it was fifty years ago. Many books have been written about his life and ideas. But David Reisman breaks new ground by providing one of the best and most comprehensive explainations of Veblen's thought. Written in a strikingly fresh and lucid style, this work is one of the landmarks of the literature on this great and enduringly relevant economist.' Geoffrey M. Hodgson, University of Hertfordshire, UK 'Considering the inability of conventional economics to comprehend the socio-economic convulsions over the past few years in so many countries, it is surely time to try something else. David Reisman's The Social Economics of Thorstein Veblen thus appears at a most opportune moment. This original analytical study is the best introduction into Veblen's work that I know of, and will, I trust, encourage a renewal of interest in possibly the most unjustly neglected of economists. Reisman's primary contention that there is despite obstacles to comprehension created by Veblen's personal idiosyncrasies and unconventional literary style a Veblen structure of thought, or general system, is fully confirmed by the evidence presented in his book. In this demonstration lies its great merit.' Samuel Hollander, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel 'Veblen is a notoriously difficult economist to read and understand. He was, however, unequivocal in his scorn for neoclassical economics, whose demise he took pleasure in predicting. In light of the limp excuses offered by the economics profession for its failure to anticipate the current global financial crisis, Reisman's incisive analysis of Veblen's writings suggests that were Veblen alive today, he would be revelling in schadenfreude. This timely book will make uncomfortable reading for neoclassical economists.' Douglas Mair, Heriot-Watt University, UK 'Reisman offers a brilliant distillation of Veblen's jaundiced purview of the social, psychological and pecuniary motivations that have driven man the social animal in his economic life down the ages, from noble savage to predatory barbarian in his ancient, modern, and potential guises. Avoiding hagiography, this book exposes Veblen's exaggerations as well as his compelling institutional insights into the evolution of capitalism and socialism. Reisman's own intellectual sweep in explaining and criticising Veblen demonstrate political economy at its best.' Roger Sandilands, University of Strathclyde, UK Thorstein Veblen was a multidisciplinary social scientist whose original insights continue to inspire debate. Rather than focusing on allocation, markets and scarcity, his perspective on economics was rather one of Darwinian evolution and perpetual development, unfolding conventions and interpersonal constraints. This interdisciplinary and comprehensive book determines that Veblen's disparate theories of conspicuous consumption, imperial Germany, the giant corporation and the speculation-led cycle all add up to a consistent and coherent world-view. Veblen was a fascinating author who deserves to be read for himself. This penetrating new interpretation demonstrates that he also identified a serious threat to property and peace in the form of irresponsible finance and frustrated workmanship. He believed corporate capitalism was at risk from its internal contradictions. This lucid book assesses the logic behind Veblen's stark and apocalyptic vision. The Social Economics of Thorstein Veblen examines all of Veblen's books and articles, revealing that they are closely integrated to form an organic whole. It will prove valuable for scholars and students interested in sociological theory, politics and political economy, history and institutional economics.

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was an American economist and sociologist. He is well known as a witty critic of capitalism. Veblen is famous for the idea of "conspicuous consumption." Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. Content: The Theory of the Leisure Class The Theory of Business Enterprise The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts The Higher Learning in America Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution The Vested Interests and the Common Man The Engineers and the Price System The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science? The Preconceptions of Economic Science Professor Clark's Economics The Limitations of Marginal Utility Gustav Schmoller's Economics Industrial and Pecuniary Employments On the Nature of Capital Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx Böhm-Bawerk's Definition of Capital and the Source of Wages The Overproduction Fallacy The Price of Wheat since 1867 Adolph Wagner's New Treatise The Food Supply and the Price of Wheat The Army of the Commonweal The Economic Theory of Women's Dress The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor The Beginning of Ownership The Barbarian Status of Women Mr. Cummings's Strictures on "The Theory of the Leisure Class" The Later Railway Combinations Levasseur on Hand and Machine Labor... The Use of Loan Credit in Modern Business Credit and Prices Fisher's Capital and Income Fisher's Rate of Interest The Industrial System and the Captains of Industry ...

Should the arts receive public support? Can the arts survive in a modern capitalist society? Can economics shed light on the nature of public support, and whether there is a rationale for public intervention? This book undertakes to examine these questions as it explores the ways government and public resources are used to support the arts. This book applies a Veblenian approach to understanding economic development to investigate public support for the arts in an effort to determine whether this approach can elucidate economic rationales for public support. Divided into three parts, the first provides basic information on public support for the arts by surveying support in the United States and Australia. Part two includes a neoclassical overview of the topic while part three presents Veblen’s ideas on economic development. This book will be of interests to researchers concerned with cultural and institutional economics, as well as political economy.

A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

In his latest book, scholar-historian Murray G. Murphey exhaustively explores the life and theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), whom, many scholars agree, remains one of the leading social theorists of all time, if not also one of the more confounding. Murphey’s account begins with a brief economic history of nineteenth-century America, wherein he examines the conditions that formed Veblen’s ideology. With that understanding, the author studies Veblen’s personal history and brings to the fore his foundational ideas on human psychology, race, his theory of knowledge, and his analysis of social evolution. In the book’s later chapters, Murphey considers Veblen’s writing through the scope of his major volumes – The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise, and Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, among others. Spanning the latter stages of the nineteenth century into the first several decades of the twentieth century, Murphey traces Veblen’s radical economics and thinking within the broader context of America’s economic theory. In so doing, he upholds Veblen’s influence on the canons of economics and social science, and importantly, he attempts to resolve the lingering mystery behind one of America’s more puzzling and influential theorists.

This is a brilliant and unconventional study of one of the most challenging figures in modern social and economic thought. David Riesman has chosen a deliberately personal method of exposition and evaluation, and he is by no means a disciple. He says of Veblen: 'I find him more often interesting than attractive, more often pungent than wise.' By approaching Veblen subjectively and in a critical spirit, Riesman has arrived at an estimate of the man that is objective and balanced.Veblen's ideas and attitudes are carefully examined, with particular attention to his conviction that 'the instinct of workmanship' was the constructive element in life, and to his fundamental principle of 'idle curiosity.' Veblen is seen as a man with a passionate moral sense whose method was irony coupled with research. Riesman makes the interesting point that the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class was episodically a passionate, even revolutionary reformer, in contrast to a career primarily as an intellectual skeptic.Riesman looks behind the ideas, searching for their origins in Veblen's life, with the result that one finishes the book with a genuine sense of the strange man who is its subject. Riesman concludes that Thorstein Veblen is important not so much for his specific contribution to economic thought as for his stance toward the economy and his fellow economists. For us today, Riesman adds, Veblen's great value inheres in his way of seeing. The new introduction by Mestrovic provides an appreciation of Riesman, no less than Veblen.David Riesman is the Henry Ford II Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Harvard University. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University. Among his most important books are The Lonely Crowd; Faces in the Crowd; Individualism Reconsidered; and Constraint and Variety in American Education. His collection, Abundance for What?, confirms his place as the foremost sociologist of education in the modern era.Stjepan G. Mestrovic is a senior social theorist in his own right. He is currently located at Texas A&M University, where he is a professor of sociology.