Word: veblenism
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Spending money on beauty, according to the justices' decision, is nothing but a manifestation of Thorstein Veblen's "conspicuous waste." The justices' alternative doctrine was obviously conspicuous mediocrity. Editorialized the Architectural Forum: "Make no mistake, if this outrageous decision is permitted to stand, its effects on our three-dimensional cities will not be superficial, but disastrous." Seagram will appeal...
Bravo Giovanni offers a great voice in a tiny void. Metropolitan Opera Basso Cesare Siepi gets the chance to sing a menu. As a display of the conspicuous consumption of talent, this might have staggered Thorstein Veblen. What playgoers will find themselves conspicuously consuming at this musical comedy is their own time...
...Party was never able to adapt itself to it. It was not simply that Marxism produced no literary criticism worth printing, though that was true enough; but even the social criticism of the American Left during the '30's came from men like Parrington, Beard, and Veblen, rather than from Marx. And Aaron's sketch of a figure like Edmund Wilson shows how the its ideology blinded the Party to the efforts o the few liberal thinkers consciously seeking to adapt Marx to America...
...liberal writers Aaron talks about were men thoroughly convinced that the Depression had finished off capitalism. They had tired of the stale Progressive dogmas of the '20's, and the reality of class antagonisms was an enormous shock to them. Also, as Bohemians, readers of Veblen and Mencken, they hated the men and the ideas that dominated American society. Most, of course, satisfied personal needs in joining the party. But, as Leslie Fiedler has pointed out, a radical movement is not to be explained by adding up the pathologies of its individual members. It was not the writers who were...
...street would be better at secret decisions than, say, the historian in the street, whose discipline is also constantly undergoing revision. Probably neither would do well as a politician. Only Snow's immense common sense keeps him from sounding like the post-World War I expert-ists such as Veblen and Walter Lippmann...