Word: veblenism
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THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND HIS AMERICA ?Joseph Dorfman?Viking ($3.75). In his lifetime (1857-1929) Thorstein Bunde Veblen had a few devoted disciples and a reputation as a brilliant eccentric among his fellow-sociologists, but he was not even a name to the U. S.-at-large.* When "Technocracy" flashed in its pan (1932), its brief publicity lit up Veblen's name by reflection, brought him a posthumous and garbled notoriety. But his reputation did not sputter out with Technocracy. Author Dorfman's detailed and scholarly book is the first full-length study of Thorstein Veblen and his views...
...would not publish pseudoscientific, more or less deceptive advertising. . . . Given a literate population, the press becomes one of the instruments of government. ... If the press is financed by the vested property interests of business, then in the end business becomes government." Taking his tip from the late great Thorstein Veblen's Absentee Ownership (1923), Rorty analyzes the growth and present state of advertising, finds it has established a U. S. pseudoculture, has attempted to graft its salesman's values on the old U. S. tradition. He thinks the U. S. "tends increasingly to speak, think, feel in terms...
...high point of the Christmas Scribner's is a critique on Thorstein Veblen by Ernest Sutherland Bates. Mr. Bates has been charmed away from the truth, one feels, by a romantic sympathy for the immigrant Scandinavian, for his racial humiliation by the native Americans of Minnesota and Wisconsin. This is supposed to explain much of Veblen's vitriol as a critic of the economic society in which he lived and of the leisure class which is its characteristic by-product. If it were so, it might explain the vitriol very well, but Mr. Bates has gone no farther than assumption...
...would seem nearer to the truth to assign Veblen's vitriol to clear eyes and a sharp critical talent. More than any other man of the twentieth century, Veblen pierced the syllogized "classical economics" with its ridiculous labor equations and its mumbo jumbo on the credit system. It is through no fault of his that these things persist in the colleges of the nation, for much of his energy was spent in attempting to force them out. Mr. Bates remarks that he was handicapped, in his later years, by a delusion of prophecy that made him see himself...
...next recordable appearance is in 1920 as director of the Technical Alliance a loose organization for the discussion of social implications of the Machine Age. The late Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Thorstein Veblen were members. Other, living ones, are Stuart Chase, Frederick Lee Ackerman (Manhattan architect), Bassett Jones (Manhattan elevator engineer). They erroneously believed Howard Scott a doctor of science from the Technische Hochschule, at Charlottenburg, Germany. The interlocutions of the Technical Alliance languished. But Howard Scott, in Greenwich Village, prated and ratiocinated...