Veblen's Century

A Collective Portrait

Irving Horowitz, Irving Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351325141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Thorstein Veblen has a place of honor reserved for truly important figures. Economist, iconoclast, social critic, and moral judge of the American way of life, he has continued to attract the attention of students and scholars alike. People from every spectrum of political thought and every branch of the social sciences have been drawn to his work-sometimes in praise, other times in criticism, but always with a sense of measuring what Veblen said and often how he said it.Veblen was, in the final analysis, an anthropologist of America as an advanced culture, as much a figure of the young twentieth century of America triumphant, as Tocqueville was a figure of the young nineteenth century of America ascending. We share with Veblen a sense of the observer peering at the complex foundation of behavior, whether such behavior is defined in terms of attitudes toward work and leisure, wealth and poverty, and finally, global war and peace.An examination of the contributors to the Veblen literature in this masterful volume serves to make clear just how vital Veblen was and remains to our cultural landscape. Whether the reader selects from or reads all of the statements by David Riesman, Douglas Dowd, Max Lerner, E. Digby Baltzell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and the other outstanding participants in Veblen's Century, the pulsating vitality of Veblen himself is well captured. Indeed, a little bit of Veblen is encapsulated in and by his commentators.Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the home of Veblen, books on him were offered to

Part I

1
Veblen in the Context of American Culture

David Riesman

Although Veblen was aloof, he was not isolated. Historians have emphasized his Norwegian inheritance, but Ole Rølvaag had a similar inheritance and was not flawed. The environment was more important—the Middle Border that produced in his generation Lester Ward and Frederick Turner, Vernon Parrington and Charles Beard, Simon Patten and John R. Commons, and so many others who broke through the neat patterns of thought which the wise men of the East had designed for them.

Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind

At least since the Romantic movement, the intellectuals of all the Western world have been prey to disaffection. On the Continent, they have not lacked place and power, but they have bemoaned the lack of stable class and symbolic identifications or have leaped into factitious identifications with “the workers” or “the State” or some similar abstraction. Everywhere, as an attempted banner of their own identity, they have elaborated a stance towards the machine, sometimes to rhapsodize but more commonly to denigrate. Occasionally, they have looked beyond the machine to the processes of social organization, viewed as machine-like—as in Max Weber’s image of the West caught in an “iron cage” of overrationality and overcontrol, to be coped with only by stoic self-control. In the novels and aphorisms of Kafka these cumulated attitudes received perhaps their most profound expression.

We may remind ourselves of these attitudes by reference to what I regard as the most searching criticism that has been published on Veblen: T.W. Adorno’s “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” an article which makes the point that Veblen, for all his splenetic rage, was too much the prisoner of the norms of American culture, such as efficiency and hard-headed practicality, to render an adequate account of it. Adorno writes (Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 9, 1941, pp. 392, 401):

As the mass production of identical goods and their monopolistic distribution advances and as the framework of highly industrialized life permits less and less the genuine individuation of a hic et nunc, the pretension of the hic et nunc to escape universal fungibility becomes more illusory. It is as if each thing’s claim to be something special were mocking at a situation in which everyone and everything is incessantly subject to a perennial sameness. Veblen cannot stand this mockery. His rebellion actually lies in his obstinate insistence that this world present itself with that abstract sameness of its commodities which is prescribed by its economical and technological condition.… To him, the false castle [modern Gothic and Baroque] is nothing but a reversion. He knows nothing of its intrinsic modernity and visualizes the illusionary images of uniqueness in the era of mass production as mere vestiges instead of “responses” to capitalistic mechanization which betrays something of the latter’s essence.¹

The wave of avant-garde pessimism about industrial (or “mass”) society hit America late, and spottily. But, just as America had developed its own brand of economic interpretation of history prior to the importation of Marx—many of the Federalist papers are good examples—so a number of mid-nineteenth-century observers such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, had found their way to a pessimistic and sardonic view of their society—indeed, of human society in general. By the end of the century the native stream, with roots in seaboard provincialism, frontier loneliness, and, often, more or less secularized Calvinistic strains, had merged with the older and richer Continental tradition of pessimism and disenchantment. The nineties were not gay for Brooks and Henry Adams, for O. W. Holmes, Jr. (in his public role), Mark Twain, Henry James, the “new” Howells, Veblen. (Note that I do not include here the reformers and the muck-rakers—such writers as Lloyd and Bellamy: these people were not deeply disaffected: for them the world was real; it made sense, or could readily do so provided such and such were done; their very protest related them to what was going on.)

Some of these men, it is true, were not so much impatient with the Western world as a whole as with the figure cut in that world by the United States. Brooks Adams much of the time was angry with his country for being crass, not strong and brave: he despised commerce and admired war. Henry Adams wavered between being cross with his country for not making more prominent use of him and his cadre and being in despair about the world of the dynamo where, as Walter Lippmann later put it, translating Aeschylus, “Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus.” Henry James wanted to see America more cultured and civilized, an attitude common to many sensitive expatriates whether or not they left home; at the same time, like Brooks Adams, he had small hope even for the commercial culture of Britain.

In comparison with these men whose disenchantment with the world or with America was sophisticated, there is something je-june about Veblen, as also about the only literary man of stature who recognized him, namely Howells. Howells and Veblen, like Mark Twain, were Midwesterners and, though each in his way was educated in the East and in close touch with its thought and values, they were never socially secure enough to afford the kind of ennui-pessimism of the Eastern patricians. As a result, it is not surprising that avant-garde literary fashion in our day has left them pretty much out of account. And with a certain justice, I think. It is hard not to be impatient with Mark Twain when we read his remark about Henry James’ The Bostonians (when it appeared in the same Century magazine with Huckleberry Finn): he’d “rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that”—a remark more in keeping with Paul Bunyan’s America than John’s heaven. If Veblen ever read The Bostonians, in this writer’s judgment one of the finest novels ever written about America, his biographers give no sign of it, but they speak of his liking the verse of Edward Carpenter. Though himself one of the few social scientists to become a master of literary craft, he was incapable of identifying himself with the literary world—a not uncommon experience of American writers then and since. When he read Ibsen we can be pretty sure it was for the great Norwegian’s iconoclasm rather than for his dramatic art.

By the same token, however, Veblen, Twain, and Howells partially escaped those currents of attitude towards America that engulfed men and women whose tastes were formed on European standards. In fact Veblen, like Mark Twain, was something of a Philistine, but he was not so provincial as to judge his country from the eyes of a foreign capital. He did not want anything for America that he did not also want for Europe. By making himself at home (true, with all the discomforts of home) in the international field of economics, he avoided petty transatlantic arguments. In his erudition, he is more cosmopolitan than Mark Twain or Henry Ford, both men with whom I wish now to compare him.

Veblen and Mark Twain

Veblen and Mark Twain have been linked in my own mind as men whose irony at once expressed and concealed a raging bitterness against all in the Gilded Age (Mark Twain’s term) that was shoddy, effete, or pretentious. Both men grew less benign as they aged, and more willing to reveal their rancor. Both were instinctively on the side of the downtrodden—the Negroes, the ne’er-do-wells, the impious in the case of Mark Twain. Both viewed the Middle Ages in a similar Voltairean light, as a regimen of brutal lords and swindling priests. Indeed, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court takes a view as rosy as Veblen’s towards the machine process, and manifests as little nostalgia for the peasant and handicraft era. Both the Connecticut Yankee and The Theory of the Leisure Class have only ridicule for archaism, mystery and priestcraft: both are the books of freethinkers who keep hoping the better man, the matter-of-fact man with slide-rule, will win in the end. Bernard DeVoto writes (in Mark Twain’s America, p. 274) that “The nineteenth century, which ‘turns automata into men,’ is vindicated and the Utopia of Mark’s imagination is seen to be an affecting blend of Hannibal’s small farms and the Colt’s Arms culture of Hartford.” Mark Twain urges the oppressed to take matters into their own hands but, like Veblen, he has little faith that they will: the book is full of pain at the way “this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of a common oppressor.” The book closes with the revolution defeated in a pool of blood.

What is striking in both men is that they believe in progress and yet doubt it. They are harbingers of doom and corruption while still sharing, with hardly an exception, the beliefs of the Enlightenment as transplanted to the American Midwest. They are against the corporations and against high tariffs, against chivalry and the genteel tradition, against all vested interests and for the common man. But they see the common man as easily duped; hence their despair. For one thing, both lack self-confidence: common men themselves, they feel vulnerable and pull or disguise their punches. Mark Twain submitted to editing by his refined wife and by refined editors such as Gilder and (to a degree) Howells, much as Veblen was persuaded to tone down The Higher Learning.

In Mark Twain the despair takes the form of seeing the pre-Gold Rush Midwest and pre-pubertal boyhood as idyllic: in his work as in his life, he could not come to terms with post-Civil War America, or with adults whom he tended to make either into saints like Joan of Arc or sinners like the corrupted men of Hadleyburg. Veblen describes his own similar difficulties projectively when, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, he discusses the character and aptitudes of his concededly somewhat mythical savage (pp. 223-224):

As seen from the point of view of life under modern civilised conditions in an enlightened community of the Western culture, the primitive, ante-predatory savage…was not a great success. Even for the purposes of that hypothetical culture to which his type of human nature owes what stability it has even for the ends of the peaceable savage group—this primitive man has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as he has economic virtues,—as should be plain to any one whose sense of the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At his best he is “a clever, good-for-nothing fellow.” The shortcomings of this presumptively primitive type of character are weakness, inefficiency, lack of initiative and ingenuity and a yielding and indolent amiability, together with a lively but inconsequential animistic sense. Along with these traits go certain others which have some value for the collective life process, in the sense that they further the facility of life in the group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness, good-will, and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and things.

Even if his fellow-men had followed Veblen’s injunction not to write any biographies of him, this passage would serve as an amiable, non-invidious description of him. He might cavil only at the statement that he possessed an animistic sense, since so much of his life was spent attacking animism, but I am inclined to think (and can find supporting passages in Veblen himself) that hardly anyone gets through life without some animism—certainly, few scientists do. However that may be, the passage expresses Veblen’s lack of self-confidence and his feeling, which he shared with Mark Twain, of vulnerability in the modern market-place. While Veblen disguised his feelings of inadequacy by silence and withdrawal in company, Mark Twain disguised his by joking and occasional truculence, but when this was ill-received as in the famous dinner for the elder Holmes, Twain would beg apologies abjectly. This is not unlike Veblen’s method of repeated disclaimer that he means no ill in his books, and we must recall in this connection his abject reply to Cummings.

These similarities led me to wonder whether Mark Twain, like Veblen, had suffered from an intimidating father coupled with a weak but whimsical mother. Dixon Wecter’s book, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, offers some fairly convincing evidence on this. Mark Twain described his father as “a stern, unsmiling man”—“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak” (Wecter, p. 67). The father “never demonstrated affection for wife or child.” Sam Clemens, like Veblen, was a silent rebel, a prankish nonconformist. Wecter quotes an autobiographical note: “Campbellite revival. All converted but me. All sinners again in a week” (p. 88). Mark Twain’s mother, like Veblen’s, was more whimsical than the father and less orderly, given to fairy tales and fond of the Bible.

Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, in an unpublished version, “thinks well of the cat because she is the only independent; says there is no such thing as an independent human being—all are slaves.…” The Stranger “often said he would not give a penny for human company when he could get better.… He said that the natural man, the savage, had no prejudices about smells, and no shame for his God-made nakedness.... The wild creatures trooped in from everywhere, and climbed all over Satan, and sat on his shoulder and his head; and rummaged his pockets and made themselves at home.…”

This mood vis-à-vis the animal kingdom, it seems to me, strikingly resembles Veblen’s—recall his defense of cats whom he praised as against the servility of dogs in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Duffus describes Veblen at Cedro as getting on better with animals than with men. A skunk would brush against him, and animals would wander in and out of his house without Veblen moving a muscle. “He had no sentimental love for nature,” Duffus writes; “What he had was a kind of amused tolerance.”

Shortly before he died, Veblen wrote a characteristically self-effacing note (quoted by Dorfman, p. 504):

It is also my wish, in case of death, to be cremated, if it can conveniently be done, as expeditiously and inexpensively as may be, without ritual or ceremony of any kind; that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea [he was in Stanford at the time], or into some sizable stream running to the sea; that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription, or monument of any name or nature, be set up in my memory or name in any place or at any time; that no obituary, memorial, portrait, or biography of me, nor any letters written to or by me be printed or published, or in any way reproduced, copied or circulated.

There are of course many ironies in Veblen’s use here (as in other writings) of the language of legal chicane that had cost his father so dear—as if to prove he could handle the English language as badly as any man of native stock. But what is more striking is how closely Veblen’s attitude here, too, resembles that of Mark Twain who wrote to a friend (Wecter, p. 119):

If Henry and my father feel as I would feel under their circumstances, they want no prominent or expensive lot, or luxurious entertainment in the new cemetery. As for a monument—well, if you remember my father, you are aware that he would rise up and demolish it the first night. He was a modest man and would not be able to sleep under a monument.

Yet, concealed in such casual attitudes towards the bodies of the dead, are bitter aggressions against the sentiments of the living. To be sure, Mark Twain, who ended up an unhappy celebrity, did not order his papers destroyed; he handled the problem of post-mortem scrutiny quite differently. Life forced and aided him to overcome his tendencies to withdrawal; although like Veblen he seems never to have come to terms with his own sexuality either in his life or in his work, he himself became something of a businessman and promoter, following in this in the footsteps of Tom Sawyer. Veblen’s picture of the American businessman was much more steadily relentless, and his critique of course far more searching. What nevertheless links the two men beyond the details of biography and theme are the courage and the limitations of their satire. For both, satire served as a mask of detachment from the world’s brutalities. Neither, however, could maintain a consistent tone: in both, irony sometimes barely rises above mere description, sometimes verges on burlesque. Even their best books proceed by association from one thing to another: both were too much, for good and ill, at the mercy of their material to impose plot and ordered structure upon it. Both repeat themselves endlessly—possibly, satire cannot escape monotone since it compels only a one-eyed view of its subject, and Gulliverts voyages fade into one another as do Mark Twain’s and as do Veblen’s sallies against the sporting men and the “kept classes,” the Yahoos of his day. But every limitation for a writer is also an opportunity, and in both Veblen and Mark Twain it is satire that saves them from the dreariness of muckraking and the pieties of the genteel tradition in literature and scholarship.

If Veblen as an artist bears comparison with Mark Twain, Veblenism as a set of attitudes bears comparison with Fordism. When my colleague, Reuel Denney, called the Model-T, and its successors among the hot-rods, “Veblenian vehicles,” he meant that the stripped-down, matter-of-fact car could be taken as representing a protest against the plushy, yacht-like cars of 1915 and the chrome-spangled parlor sofa which has become the Detroit merchandising staple today. Staughton Lynd, who assisted me in this book, has pointed out the personal and ideological resemblances of Ford and Veblen. Ford, indeed, may be seen as the archetype of the Veblenian engineer, waging relentless war on behalf of industry against business (with its subsidiary chicaneries of banking, law, and politics), and against conspicuous consumption and leisure-class values generally.

Garet Garrett says of Ford in The Wild Wheel that he “discovered familiar things with the innocence of first-seeing” (p. 19). Money, he never wearied of pointing out, had not built the Ford Motor Company but hard work, coupled with the skills embodied in machinery. Like Veblen, Ford did not believe that work went on in the office. It is a twice-told tale how he was always either firing white-collar workers or forcing them into overalls—he himself never used his office in the Administration Building which had somehow risen in spite of him, and he was happiest on the factory floor. Once he discovered a group of men who told him they comprised the Statistical Department. He told his production boss Sorensen he could have the space, and the latter moved in with crowbars and demolished the department.

Fearing constraint and formal rules much as Veblen and Mark Twain did, Ford refused to allow any titles to develop in his organization. Hating absentee ownership and the “money power,” it is we...