Word: veblen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Savage World. Thorstein Veblen also cast a jaundiced eye on the bourgeoisie. A nonconformist who might have been one of Sinclair Lewis' village atheists, he was born on the American frontier of Norwegian parents. Among other peculiarities, he locked his watch to his vest with a large safety pin and he'd up his socks with two pins moored to his pants. His idea of a joke was to return a borrowed sack to a farmer with a hornet's nest inside. Acidly sardonic, he called religion "the fabrication of vendible imponderables in the nth dimension," religious...
...books he savagely dissected early American capitalism-in a predatory era when Cornelius Vanderbilt could write to his associates: "Gentlemen, you have undertaken to ruin me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you." Veblen took a closer look at the people Marx called the ruling class, and produced a new label: the leisure class. The businessman, to Veblen, was a saboteur of the economy, because instead of just sticking to making goods, he tried to regulate output in order to make more money. Eventually, thought Veblen, the engineers would inherit the world...
...many, it is reactionary. In his time, the idea that the state must control economic affairs Was reactionary; today, for millions, it is the only true liberalism. All but extreme partisans agree, nevertheless, that modern American capitalism is a different brand, never envisaged by Marx, not yet seen by Veblen, probably not fully understood by Keynes. Contemporary economists of all shadings worry about it-fearing that it may collapse under its own weight and bigness, or be destroyed by meddling government, or by Communism...
...Notably Thorstein Veblen who, in 1899, wrote: "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure...
...certainties began to crumble before the blows of science and the resulting new philosophies. After that, he is understandably content to give up trying to frame the mind of the most complex of all nations and moves rapidly through such routine academic assignments as William James and Pragmatism, Thorstein Veblen and the New Economics, the Literature of Revolt...