BiblioVault - Books about Veblen

Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo

Clare Virginia Eby

University of Missouri Press, 1999

In this important interdisciplinary study, Clare Eby argues that the writings of Theodore Dreiser and Thorstein Veblen form a neglected chapter in the history of United States cultural criticism that is especially relevant today.

This study leaves behind the narrow frameworks through which most of Veblen's and Dreiser's writings have been interpreted, covering a wide range of both authors' major and minor works. Moving beyond Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class and Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Eby shows how the two writers, as saboteurs of the status quo, anticipated many preoccupations of cultural critics today: the cultural role of the intellectual, the relationship of science to society, the place of consumption in modern life, and the intersection of class, gender, and power.

Eby uses cultural criticism as a unifying concept that shows how Veblen fuses satire, sociology, economics, history, psychology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy; and how Dreiser connects fiction, travelogue, literary manifesto, occasional essay, autobiography, biography, and philosophy. By reading Veblen through Dreiser, and Dreiser through Veblen, Eby illustrates the striking parallels between their works, demonstrating how literature and social science can merge in cultural criticism.

Although Dreiser's interest in the natural and social sciences has often been noted, this study provides the only extended analysis of how his works actually resemble, and strive to become, critically informed social science. Similarly, despite the singularity of Veblen's rhetoric, the centrality of literary devices to his works has never been systematically examined. By placing the works of Veblen and Dreiser into dialogue, this study contributes significantly to the recent attempts to bring together the concerns of literary analysts and social scientists.

Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo makes an important contribution not only to Dreiser and Veblen studies but also to cultural criticism itself.

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Taylored Lives

Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford

Martha Banta

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Scientific management: technology spawned it, Frederick Winslow Taylor championed it, Thorstein Veblen dissected it, Henry Ford implemented it. By the turn of the century, practical visionaries prided themselves on having arrived at "the one best way" both to increase industrial productivity and to regulate human behavior. Martha Banta takes a close look at texts ranging from mail order catalogs and popular romances to the works of Henry Adams and Nathanael West to trace the effects of the efficiency craze on the full fabric of American culture.

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Veblen

The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics

Charles Camic

Harvard University Press, 2020

A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women.

Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider.

In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics.

Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

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