Word: veblen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...then suddenly caught on and shortly sold over a million copies. Looking Backward seemed only a sugar-coated romance ; actually, it was propaganda for a Socialist Utopia. Among those who have acknowledged its influence on their thinking have been Mark Twain, William Dean Ho wells, George Bernard Shaw, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Aristide Briand, Ramsay MacDonald, William Allen White, Eduard Benes. Unlike most Utopian outlines, Looking Backward presented a concrete program for the modern world...
...Francisco Bulletin, the New York Globe under Bruce Bliven, and regularly comes through with a novel, a biography or some other book every second or third year, written with competence, measured skepticism and social sympathies. Duffus' latest book, The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others, suggests that he got a great deal of his color, flavor and method during a year (1907-08) spent as an adolescent dishwasher and caretaker in the household of Professor Thorstein Ve blen at Cedro Cottage near the Leland Stanford campus...
Father of Technocracy. The dates and facts of Veblen's life will not be found in Duffus' graceful, charming, nostalgic memoir. A farm boy from a Norwegian settlement in Minnesota, Veblen had the habit of looking at the U.S. economic and social systems as though he were an aloof and coldly calculating anthropologist from another culture. He wrote sardonic books about the workings of the U.S. economy in a style that seems "desperately accurate" to some, a sort of elephantine, academic pig Latin to others...
Some Veblenian titles, The Engineers and the Price System, The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Theory of the Leisure Class, will recall to the initiated that Thorstein Veblen was the mental sire of many a U.S. intellectual who grew up to be a technocrat. The initiated will remember, too, that Veblen has been praised and damned as the prophet of the New Deal. His influence on Rexford Guy Tugwell, George Soule, Stuart Chase and other New Deal economists has been profound. Anti-New Dealer Edgar M. Queeny (The Spirit of Enterprise), president of the Monsanto Chemical Co., has even gone...
...Veblen is also the father of the so-called "Institutional" economists who try to describe the workings of the economic system without imputing either praise or blame. Duffus argues that Veblen was less interested in fostering a revolution than he was in describing what went on around him. Duffus recalls how Veblen shocked him one evening by remarking that there was one thing to be said for capitalism, "It works...