What Veblen Taught

This scarce text contains a collection of writing by the seminal sociologist, Thorstein Bunde Veblen. Veblen was most famous for combining Darwinian evolutionary ideas with his avant-garde institutionalist approach to contemporary economic analysis, culminating in his masterpiece: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen proposes that there is a social dichotomy between people who progress through life by way of exploitation and those who progress by way of industry ideas seminal to modern socio-economic theory today. Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, as well as leader of the institutional economics movement. Originally published in 1936, we are proud to republish this rare book with a new introductory biography of the author."

This scarce text contains a collection of writing by the seminal sociologist, Thorstein Bunde Veblen. Veblen was most famous for combining Darwinian evolutionary ideas with his avant-garde institutionalist approach to contemporary economic analysis, culminating in his masterpiece: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen proposes that there is a social dichotomy between people who progress through life by way of exploitation and those who progress by way of industry – ideas seminal to modern socio-economic theory today. Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, as well as leader of the institutional economics movement. Originally published in 1936, we are proud to republish this rare book with a new introductory biography of the author.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This is a new release of the original 1945 edition.

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.”