April 27, 2006

The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Dover Thrift Editions, 1994
Paperback, 256 pages, $3.00

By JOHN SISCOE
Contributing Writer

Thorstein Veblen, the American economist and social critic, was born to Norwegian immigrant parents in 1857. He taught for most of his academic career at the University of Chicago. Veblen was a gruff man who did not brook contradiction. He was also a bit of an oddball; his house was a perpetual mess and he had a fondness for clothes made out of paper. He also had a fondness for the faculty wives, and his reputed inability to keep his hands to himself led to his dismissal from Chicago in 1906. He continued to teach and to publish but ultimately died in obscurity in 1929.

Veblen is remembered today for his first and most successful book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which is both a scathing indictment of materialist consumerism and a very funny satire on human folly. When it was published in 1899, it ignited a furious controversy, for it amounted to a direct attack on the established values of what Mark Twain termed the Gilded Age — a time, not so unlike the present, when a small number of Americans became enormously rich and lived lives of remarkable ostentation. These fortunate few, and those who strove to emulate them, are the slowly moving targets of Veblen’s ridicule.

Veblen analyzed American society as essentially consumerist, obsessed with wealth, material possessions, and the desire for leisure. In such a society, the more expensive and useless an object or activity is, the greater its cultural value and the more mesmerizing its hold over the imagination. Veblen is especially perceptive of how flaunting wealth is a demonstration of power, and how economic decisions are often irrational: driven by fear, envy, and blind hope. The Theory of the Leisure Class made a profound impact on the study of economics, for after Veblen, few would be so brave (or so foolish) as to study economics in isolation from social or cultural factors.

But while Veblen deserves a lasting, if modest place in the history of economics, his real accomplishment lies in satire. The Theory of the Leisure Class is a send-up of human vanity and pretensions, and there’s scarcely a page in the book where one of Veblen’s shafts doesn’t strike home. Veblen’s diction and the shape of his sentences are late Victorian academic, but his observant eye is timeless, and this makes his book as lively and as pertinent today as when it was first published.

Veblen loved the useful and the inexpensive and he would have been delighted to learn that The Theory of the Leisure Class has now been republished by Dover in their Thrift Classics Series, making the entire book available for the price of a ritzy cup of coffee. Dover has published nearly 500 titles in this format, and they represent some of the best bargains in publishing. Thorstein Veblen, paper clothes and love affairs aside, deserves to be among them. n