We are all Veblenians now. Our understanding of the way people’s acquisitions and activities advertise their superiority—not least in an era of Facebook show-offs and Instagrammable lives—has roots in work that the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen published over a century ago. Behavioral economics finds a precursor in Veblen. So does evolutionary psychology. Our worries about the “financialization” of capital, with its overgrowth of exotic instruments of debt and the institutions that create and trade them? Veblen got there first. Patriarchy as a system centered on warfare, private property, and the control of women’s bodies: this feminist vision, too, was elaborated in his work.
Veblen even presaged the ascent of Trump. “A degree of arrested spiritual and mental development is, in practical effect, no bar against entrance into public office,” he once wrote. “Indeed, a degree of puerile exuberance coupled with a certain truculent temper and boyish cunning is likely to command something of popular admiration and affection.”
Given that Veblen so shaped our view of the world, it’s striking that our view of him has long been so distorted. For generations, he was seen as a “marginal man”—someone raised in penury within an insular immigrant community, who spoke no English until well into his teens, whose eccentric manner branded him as a social outcast and an academic outsider (save when it came to the bedrooms of faculty wives), and who saw through the complacencies of his scholarly age precisely because he never fit into it.
This depiction was put forth in a much-lauded biography that the Columbia economist Joseph Dorfman published in 1934, five years after his subject’s death. It set the tone for later writing on Veblen by such eminences as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Daniel Bell. Only in the 1990s did revisionist scholarship reveal this portrait to be tendentious almost to the point of fraudulence. Charles Camic, a sociologist at Northwestern, pushes the argument further in Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, his book about the intellectual background of Veblen’s thought. Evidently he was not only far from a marginal man in his personal life; he was, in his professional life, the “consummate academic insider.”