Word: veblen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second printing, and while it has not yet matched Bloom's and Hirsch's sales, it is a brisk seller and has sparked spirited debate over its thesis. America, Jacoby says, is producing no young crop of heirs to the great public writer-thinkers like H.L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, whose works set directions and standards 60 and 70 years ago. Nor, he notes, have successors emerged for the current senior generation of broad-gauge university scholars like David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell, with their insights on society and the economy...
Next semester John is planning to lead a study group on Marx, Weber, and Veblen. Scott Feira '89, who is participating in the Constitution study group, described the planned study group as a "miniature version of Social Studies...
...speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old." What railroad men and land speculators were to the 1870s, investment bankers and risk arbitragers are to the 1980s. Perhaps a , modern-day Thorstein Veblen could explain the eagerness with which moneymen like Boesky vied with one another in acquiring the luxurious trappings of a baronial life-style. But the insider-trading scandal, a grotesque perversion of the Reagan free-market ethos, was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the gospel of wealth run amuck...
...housed in sports: vitality, spontaneity, the bursting of bonds. No state religion for the U.S., but sports will do as well. The Puritans condemned games as antispiritual. Their heirs retaliated by fusing holidays with tournaments?football on Thanksgiving, basketball at Christmas?all blasphemies culminating in Super Sunday. Thorstein Veblen contended that sports and religion have the same genesis in a basic "belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition in the sequence of events." We'll take his word for it. In simpler terms, Americans make stadiums their churches because they trust that therein lies national virtue. Extolling baseball...
Perhaps because he never knew his father, Mumford collected a number of tempestuous mentors, including Economist Thorstein Veblen ("a strange combination of the austere, seemingly superobjective scholar and a passionate, willful human being"), Critic Van Wyck Brooks and, above all, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish social theorist recognized as the father of town planning. Geddes later drove his student away by insisting that Mumford turn his teacher's brilliant but chaotic mental processes into limpid prose. But Mumford never repudiated what Geddes stood for: "The regional outlook, the urban focus, the unification of all the dispersed and dissociated aspects...