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Thorstein Veblen

1857–1929 · 72 years Tier II

The farm boy whose Yale doctorate bought him seven jobless years

Portrait of Thorstein Veblen — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Veblen was the sixth of 12 children born to Norwegian immigrant farmers in Cato, Wisconsin, and grew up mostly in Rice County, Minnesota, on land his father's carpentry and his mother's home doctoring had made prosperous enough to educate all 12 of them. He studied under John Bates Clark at Carleton College, then philosophy under Charles Sanders Peirce at Johns Hopkins, then took a Yale doctorate in 1884 with a dissertation on the ethics of retribution. Nothing followed. He spent seven years without an academic post — unemployable, university administrators reportedly suspected, because he was an open agnostic without the divinity credential most schools still wanted — and went back to his father's farm to read.

At 34 he returned to graduate school at Cornell rather than start over as an undergraduate, then followed a professor to the University of Chicago, where he edited the Journal of Political Economy and in 1899 published The Theory of the Leisure Class. The book gave English two working phrases, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, for spending and idleness performed as proof of status rather than needed for anything, and it founded what economists still call institutional economics — the study of how custom and power, not efficient markets, actually set the terms of exchange. He wrote a dozen more books, including The Theory of Business Enterprise and The Engineers and the Price System, coined the idea of trained incapacity, and in 1919 helped found the New School for Social Research in New York.

The man who diagnosed the leisure class never approached its comforts himself. He drew modest professorial salaries and was repeatedly passed over, while affairs trailed him from job to job and forced his resignation from Stanford in 1909. His first wife, Ellen Rolfe, spent decades blamed by colleagues and biographers for the marriage's failure, until a 1926 autopsy found the actual cause: reproductive organs that had never developed, leaving her infertile in a way neither of them had understood at the time. His second wife, Ann Bevans, in a marriage students called far happier than the first, died prematurely in 1920. He finished his life on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park on 500 to 600 dollars a year, and it was a stepdaughter, not any university that had employed him, who was in the room when he died.

He asked, in his will, to be buried without ceremony and without a stone, and got his wish — no grave marks him. The phrase he coined outlived every argument about his character. Conspicuous consumption entered ordinary speech within a generation, detached from the theory that produced it, and institutional economics became a recognized school that later economists, John Kenneth Galbraith prominent among them, built careers extending. Novelists used him as shorthand for a certain kind of merciless clarity — Sinclair Lewis cited him directly in his fiction — and feminist economists rediscovered his critique of status display decades after his death. The eccentric who could barely hold a job outlasted most of the institutions that fired him.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Thorstein Veblen's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Theory of the Leisure Class book
Coined conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure 1899
The Theory of Business Enterprise book
Distinguished industry from finance 1904
The Instinct of Workmanship book
His account of craft and technology 1914
Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution book
Written on the eve of American entry into the First World War 1915
The Higher Learning in America book
A critique of universities run like businesses 1918
New School for Social Research company
Co-founded with John Dewey, Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson 1919

Life in brief

with age at each point

July 30, 1857 aged 0 Born in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant farmers
1880 aged ~23 Graduates from Carleton College
1884 aged ~27 Takes a Yale doctorate, then finds no academic post for seven years
1888 aged ~31 Marries Ellen Rolfe
1899 aged ~42 Publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class
1909 aged ~52 Forced to resign from Stanford amid scandal
1914 aged ~57 Marries Ann Bradley Bevans She died in 1920.
1919 aged ~62 Co-founds the New School for Social Research
August 3, 1929 aged 72 Dies in Menlo Park, California