The ambiguities of this stance were typical of Veblen, perhaps the most accomplished and certainly the most original American economist of his era, and subject of a landmark new biography by sociologist Charles Camic. Though a fulsome critic of the flagrant predations of Gilded Age capitalism and biting chronicler of its business aristocracy, he could appear indifferent to the popular movements that drew on similar arguments. Prescient in recognizing the interconnectedness of individual fates within a country rapidly becoming a single industrial whole, he was unremittingly hostile to reform with any shade of “paternalism”—especially from the state. Living through economic convulsion and class conflict unlike any other in U.S. history, he often preferred to retreat into the long view of an evolutionary perspective that reduced the present to a little speck in the passage of millennia. The historian John Patrick Diggins neatly summarized some of these ambiguities in the preface to his 1978 study The Bard of Savagery:
On the left Marxists admire his critique of capitalism but are piqued by his rejection of Hegel and dialectical materialism; liberals value his attack on big business but are disturbed by his skepticism about historical progress; conservatives rejoice in his exposure of the foibles of mass society but are shocked by his disrespect for the rich and the powerful; and feminists esteem his understanding of the archaic basis of masculine domination but are puzzled by his own relationships with women. Veblen seems to delight everyone and satisfy no one.
Yet despite these antinomies, Veblen’s ideas inarguably have a new urgency in what many have called our new Gilded Age, as wealth inequality has soared past mid-twentieth century levels to approach that of its namesake. The objects of Veblen’s notorious critique in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)—“conspicuous consumption,” “wastefulness,” “pecuniary culture,” the “parasitism” of elites—strike a new resonance as stocks soar to record highs while millions are out of work or forced to labor in unsafe conditions, as the ultra-rich helicopter to the Hamptons for the pandemic while everyone else shelters in place, as the billionaire president conducts affairs of state from his many golf resorts. “Real estate,” Veblen once remarked, “is an enterprise in ‘futures,’ designed to get something for nothing from the unwary, of whom it is believed by experienced persons that ‘there is one born every minute.’” Sound familiar?