In 1899, the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen proposed a unified field theory of American civilization. In his savage and oracular masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen theorized that wasteful extravagance isn’t a mere byproduct of consumer capitalism, but its underlying rationale. After all, without gross displays of wealth—“conspicuous consumption” was Veblen’s memorable term—how do the rich differentiate themselves from the democratic rabble? In contemporary terms, a purse is a place to keep Kleenex; a twelve-thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton handbag is conspicuous consumption. A Honda Civic is an automobile; a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar Lexus RX SUV … you get the picture.
Given their obvious applicability to modern life, Veblen’s ideas about money and social class have never really gone out of fashion among progressive intellectuals. Lewis Mumford, for instance, compared Leisure Class to a stick of dynamite wrapped up to look like a stick of candy. John Kenneth Galbraith was a fan, as was Albert Einstein. Just this past December, a group of prominent thinkers, including Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, held a symposium at New York’s New School for Social Research to discuss, in the Boston Globe’s words, how Veblen’s ideas might “help revive the Progressive tradition in the age of NASDAQ, branding, and bling-bling.”
Veblen’s progressive legacy is also the subject of the recent Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, by Louis Patsouras, a history professor at Kent State University. “[W]hy did Veblen, from a relatively affluent immigrant family, who then scaled the heights of academia, become a socialist?” Patsouras writes. “Some tentative answers: His rapid upward social mobility reinforced his outsider immigrant awareness, undoubtedly heightened by his encounter in academia with the Yankee upper-class academic elite, the contrast and attendant tensions between his life situation and theirs being more than obvious.”
In other words, Veblen was not just a socialist—he was a perpetual misfit. While Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is a primer on Veblen’s socialist tendencies, it’s rather a shame that it doesn’t include a biographical sketch of its subject, since Veblen was such an endearingly eccentric figure. A lazy, deeply disorderly man, he was caricatured by no less a snob than H.L. Mencken as “Prof. Dr.”—the stereotypical befuddled professor. As a teacher at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, Veblen delivered his lectures in an inaudible mumble. He was, according to his earliest biographer, Joseph Dorfman, an incurable philanderer who lost at least two academic jobs through his inability to keep his hands off his colleagues’ wives. He proposed making clothing out of paper. Also, Veblen hated dogs.
“He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits,” Veblen writes in a typically acidic passage from Leisure Class. “For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude toward his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.”
And he hated shaving: “There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society.”
And sports: “The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man’s moral nature.”
So how did a nice Norwegian boy from Minnesota turn into such a misanthrope—indeed, the most caustic grump of his age? In fact, the place where Veblen grew up, a modest farmstead just outside the southern Minnesota town of Nerstrand, may have had a great deal to do with the formation of his idiosyncratic views. The rural Midwest was, in Veblen’s time, awash in radical Populism. Only three years before the appearance of Leisure Class, William Jennings Bryant had delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And a few decades earlier, a Minnesota farmer had founded the Grange to fight against the moneyed interests of the Gilded Age. Veblen seems to have internalized certain aspects of his home state’s character: the ornery independent streak of sod-busting pioneers, along with a crippling sense of inferiority. The latter certainly had something to do with Veblen’s disdain for showy displays of wealth. One has to be pretty alienated, after all, to imagine, as Veblen did, that high society is nothing more than a grotesque masque.
Veblen regarded the rich as Charles Darwin regarded Galapagos tortoises: They were a faintly ridiculous foreign species lost in time. In Veblen’s view, the idle rich of the Gilded Age weren’t just ludicrous, they were less evolved. Their brand of laissez-faire capitalism, he argued, was a residue of our barbarian heritage. All the trappings of wealth were signifiers of antiquity; fancy clothes, servants, and racehorses merely replaced the warring and slave-owning that had distinguished the ruling elite in pre-civilized times. This tendency to define economic class in terms of taste in material goods Veblen called “invidious comparison.” Today, it is Lexus and Louis Vuitton that signify your standing. Veblen understood, though, that this distinction wasn’t expressed only in luxury goods; the barbarian elite also emulated the poor—the only other idle social class—by adopting their “archaically simple” tastes. This is especially true today in the retail marketplace. A French peasant pedestal creamer; shade-grown organic Angolan coffee; a climbing vacation in Nepal: All fit Veblen’s definition of “pecuniary emulation” because they mimic rustic simplicity while in fact costing an arm and a leg. To Veblen, these displays of wealth and waste amounted to a “symbolic pantomime.” The rich who indulged in this parade of uselessness were the evolutionary equivalent of extravagantly plumed flightless birds.
Not that you’d really get any of this from reading Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, which, weirdly, is about neither Thorstein Veblen nor the American way of life. Rather, Patsouras spends the majority of his time broadly outlining the history of socialism—a worthy undertaking, perhaps, but one that sheds little light on Veblen or his ideas. And Patsouras’s scholarly authority is somewhat undercut by an embarrassment of misspellings and grammatical errors. Veblen, who pilloried academia for its lack of rigor and stultifying atmosphere, would not have approved.
Moreover, Patsouras’s program may be fundamentally flawed. What he’s attempting in Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is, essentially, to draft Veblen for Team Marx. But while Veblen may have expressed sympathy for the Bolsheviks in Russia, saying he was a Marxist is sort of like claiming Jesus was a Republican. He seems far too much the intellectual iconoclast to go in for Marxism’s dogmatic pieties. Indeed, in 1906, Veblen even wrote that “the Marxian system is not only not tenable, but it is not even intelligible.”
Veblen’s significance may lie neither in his memorable coinages nor his politics. Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Class, an essay collection published to mark the centenary of Leisure Class, argues that the economist’s greatest contribution was inaugurating the field now known as cultural studies. Prior to Veblen, economists tended to view individuals as rationally self-interested actors; Veblen, however, understood that consumerism was a sort of pathology, a species of madness. His genius lay in recognizing the complicated, emotionally fraught relationships we have with our cars and our shoes, our alma maters and our lawns, with all of our stuff. But Veblen’s innovation was less in his ideas about materialism and culture than in his attitude toward it—roughly, that of a pith-helmeted anthropologist studying the strange rituals of the
natives. Leisure Class became a model for a certain style of sociological inquiry: the field guide to American civilization.
Take, for example, much of the work of David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. Generally speaking, he is the sort of conservative liberals can imagine having over for supper. He’s not screechy or reactionary. Plus, he wears dorky glasses and has the tonsure of a small-college professor. Recently, Brooks has had a great deal to say about the reported culture rift between “red” and “blue” states. His latest book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, extols the sensible utopianism of America’s exurbs. But it was his 1999 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a breezy and amusing survey of what the author calls America’s “meritocrats,” that basically put him on the map, pundit-wise. It might even be fair to call him the Veblen of the New Economy—which is to say, a sham Veblen.
Brooks’s Veblenesque approach is apparent from his introduction to Bobos. “The idea,” he writes, “is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude.” Like an intrepid naturalist venturing upriver, Brooks goes on to search American culture for signs of a new Mandarin elite, the Bobos, or “Bohemian bourgeoisie.” He finds evidence of their habitations and rituals in the New York Times nuptials section, with its accretion of Ivy League brainpower and old money; in an Anthropologie store in Wayne, Pennsylvania; in the wide availability of lattes in Vermont. Describing what he calls this elite’s “code of financial correctness,” Brooks writes, “Cultivated people are repelled by the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. Nothing is more disreputable than competing with your neighbors by trying to more effectively mimic the style of the social class just above you. Instead, as members of the educated class, you reject status symbols in order to raise your status with your equally cultivated peers. Everything about you might be slightly more casual than your neighbor. Your furnishings must be slightly more peasanty. Your lives should have a greater patina of simplicity.” What Brooks is describing is a twisty, irony-laced form of invidious comparison—that is, pecuniary emulation by way of archaic simplicity.
Like Veblen, Brooks proposes a theory of American social class based on consumer culture. In his view, the Bobos aren’t just a new permutation of the old class pantomime, but a new species of elite, taxonomically speaking. But just because someone affects democratic tastes doesn’t mean he isn’t also part of the old-school hereditary aristocracy (Hello? John Kerry and George W. Bush?). As Thomas Frank asserts in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, another popular recent work of anthro-punditry indebted to Veblen, Brooks manages to discuss the culture of wealth—the pantomime—without ever substantially discussing wealth itself, still the sine qua non of any elite. This disengagement of hard economics from the discussion of social class in America also owes a great deal to Veblen. Brooks is no Veblen, however: Even a century later, Leisure Class makes the musings of today’s punditry seems as insubstantial as the froth from one of those Vermont lattes.
Of course, if you want to see real proof of the currency of Veblen’s ideas, you shouldn’t be reading books; you should be watching TV. Those commercials urging you to express your rugged individualism by buying a luxury sedan? That’s invidious comparison. Fawning coverage of the lifestyles of celebrities and swashbuckling capitalists? There’s your leisure class. And, as a postmodern spin on Veblen’s symbolic pantomime, consider The Apprentice, a program in which a make-believe Robber Baron turns the social-Darwinian business world into a limp burlesque. I wonder if Veblen himself could have invented a more sublime illustration of the self-parodying barbarian class than The Donald.