International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1993

Veblen, Weber and Marx on Political E c o n o m y Michael W. Hughey and Arthur J. Vidich

Veblen is unique as an American social thinker. Unlike most of his contemporaries, whose work expresses a celebration of America and its values, Veblen examined the operation of American society from a stance of personal and intellectual distance. It is perhaps because of this that he has been so consistently misunderstood and misinterpreted by both critics and admirers. Indeed, the extent of this failure to understand Veblen on his own terms might properly be regarded as one of the great scandals of American intellectual history. No one, it seems, has attempted to assess the whole of Veblen's work as it is intended, i.e., as a comprehensive and systematic analysis and critique of the structure and operations of contemporary capitalism and its cultural values. In this book and in the two forthcoming volumes of a planned trilogy, an American scholar attempts a full-scale reassessment of the value of Thorstein Veblen's work. Professor Tilman examines Veblen's work by placing his ideas in their original intellectual and ideological setting and by scrutinizing them in relation to various European and American economic and sociological theories. His aim, it appears, is to resurrect the value of Veblen's work for new generation of social thinkers. In the present volume, Tilman examines Veblen's work as it has been perceived, evaluated, and criticized by major writers from 1891 to 1963. Grouping these writers according to their ideological perspectives, his chapters are devoted to the reactions of "Conservative Critics" (John Cummings, Richard Teggart), including its University of Chicago (Frank Knight, Abram Harris) and religious (Lev Dobriansky) variants; "Liberal Critics," including "Progressives" (George Herbert Mead, Richard Ely), "Institutionalists" (Wesley Mitchell, Paul Homan, John Commons, John Maurice Clark), "Neoinstitutionalists" (Clarence Ayres, Allan Gruchy), and Harvard and Columbia sociologists (Talcott Parsons, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Pitirim Sorokin, Robert Merton, Louis Schneider); and 491 9 1993 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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"Radical Critics," including those affiliated with the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer), the Monthly Review (Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Arthur Davis), and with assorted leftist orientations (John G. Wright, Bernard Rosenberg, Lewis Corey and John Hobson). In fleshing out the reactions of each of Veblen's critics, Tilman allows them their own voice, letting them speak for themselves by providing the reader with numerous and sometimes lengthy quotes from their work. Following the same method throughout his book, Tilman then goes on to set the record straight by criticizing the critics, in this way slowly constructing his own portrayal of Veblen's work. Through this approach, the reader is not only treated to a staggering wealth of detailed arguments, but is also led through the intellectual and ideological contexts of both the critics' and Tilman's arguments. This book is written with a self-assurance that rests on a complete and impressive command of the materials. It provides us with an encyclopedic summary of the critical American literature dealing with Veblen. Veblen's conservative critics have been uniformly offended by his critical analysis of modern industrial capitalism. As apologists and ideologists for that order, they could not accept Veblen's attacks on the premises of classical economic liberalism. They particularly rejected his central distinction between industrial and business pursuits (which delegitimates corporate leadership and profits by severing "the tie between productivity and remuneration" [p. 46]), his contention that business operates according to a pecuniary (profit/losses) rather than hedonistic (pleasure/pain) calculus, his notion that business profits rest on predatory and manipulative prowess rather that productive efficiency, and his understanding that what is good for business does not necessarily contribute to "human serviceability." Whereas conservatives have found little appeal in Veblen's work, liberals have approached it with more ambivalence. Although they have often appreciated his institutional analysis and critique of modern capitalism, they have been generally unwilling to embrace the drastic renovations of the institutional order that would be necessary to address the irrationalities and inequities that Veblen's analyses identify. "Indeed," writes Tilman, "many of Veblen's liberal critics believed that any systematic or rigorous attempt to reduce emulative waste through public policy would ultimately destroy individual freedom and initiative" (p. 262). As a result, his liberal critics have tended to reject the broader significance of Veblen's work while selectively appropriating those of his ideas that support their own ideological inclinations or favored policy reforms. Despite his devastating critique of the economics of Karl Marx, which they reject, radicals have generally found much to appreciate in Veblen's critique of capitalism,

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including his distinction between business and industry, his basic materialist approach, and his emphasis on class-based domination of the political economy and culture. However, in their view Veblen failed to offer specific policy recommendations, worked with too vague a conception of economic class, underestimated the revolutionary potential of the working class, and departed in various other ways from correct doctrine, especially in his views on the origin and foundations of economic values and property. The Harvard and Columbia sociologists examined by Tilman appear to have made a special contribution to the intellectual scandal of neglecting and misunderstanding Veblen's work, for it is they who have treated Veblen least seriously and most mistakenly. Between World War II and the 1960s, professional sociology tended to share the smug ideological complacency of a new world empire. The apparent national ideological unity of the postwar years, grounded in wartime solidarity and the Cold War threat of communism, was accepted as a norm, making it possible for sociologists to overlook the social conflicts and political disaffections that remained unexpressed until the 1960s and that lay underneath the dominant image of the Great Society and its New Frontier. Daniel Bell found it possible to declare that the Cold War era had witnessed the end not only of ideology in the U.S., but also of the class conflicts that competing ideologies nourish. Parsons took the postwar social order as the paradigmatic model of functional social equilibrium, accepting this as the best of all possible worlds and declaring any violations of his conceptions of its norms as deviant or dysfunctional. Even as the leaders of professional sociology asserted their own value neutrality and claimed for themselves the legitimacy of dispassionate science, their value assumptions and biases allied them with the ongoing public policy of the Cold War. Veblen's broad critical analysis of the American political economy and American culture did not resonate with either the leadership of the profession or with the youthful radicals who revolted against it. Hence, his work tended to be either ignored, safely sanitized, or discredited. Parsons, for example, regarded Veblen's work as having no real value for modern social theory. He dismissed Veblen as something of a crackpot, as a radical utopian who had no sense of the need for social order and individual restraint. 1 Likewise, Bell and Schneider, while somewhat more sympathetic to features of Veblen's work, also characterized his critique of American society as resting in a naive utopianism. They could therefore safely dismiss the thrust of his work as out of touch with contemporary social reality. Riesman, the least able to grasp Veblen's ideas, elected to not confront Veblen's substantive work at all, but instead questioned its validity by providing a psychobiographical profile of Veblen's personality. The result of his psychological reductionism is an ad hominem attack, a more vulgar

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version of which cannot be found in the literature. 2 Merton saw value in some of Veblen's ideas, but removed them from Veblen's overarching framework and selectively adopted them for absorption into a functionalist middle-range sociology, thus cleansing them of their gritty realism and critical significance. Veblen is arguably the only major American social thinker whose attitude of intellectual distance from his subject might have served as a fruitful model for a new generation of sociologists. With Veblen as their guide, postwar and Cold War sociologists might have formulated a more objective sociology of an emergent empire, could have deconstructed the historically and socially specific grounds of ideological and cultural orthodoxy during the postwar period, and might have examined the underlying social divisions and tensions that revived ideological differences with a vengeance in the sixties and subsequent decades. Instead, to their discredit, Veblen's intellectual distance and objective examination of the underlying economic, political and social values that regulate life in the United States is, at least in part, why postwar sociologists rejected both his intellectual example and his substantive work. The test of significance for Veblen's work should be to assess how well it describes and explains the political economy which it takes as its problem. Instead, as Tilman's book clearly demonstrates, virtually every reaction to Veblen originates in and is animated by one or another set of ideological perspectives or blinders. This can be seen in part in the difficulty his critics have had in categorizing him: conservatives and liberals tended to see him as a radical while radicals often viewed him as a liberal who sometimes used radical rhetoric. The sociologists at Harvard and Columbia treated him only in piecemeal fashion, not bothering to enter his framework or to use it as a point of departure for interpreting the post-Veblenian world. Worse, at times they have converted some of Veblen's more prescient phrases--conspicuous consumption, emulation, captains of erudition into sociological catch phrases and cliches. Even Tilman, who organizes his discussion of Veblen's critics into conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives, does not move beyond these political categories, but treats Veblen throughout the book as a radical thinker. Veblen, however, transcends such categorization; his work defies political pigeonholing. The perspective that shapes Veblen's work is not radicalism but an intellectual realism that attempts to strip away the ideological rationales and cultural mystifications of the political economy in order to lay bare the social reality underneath. His is an analytic concern to examine how our social institutions actually operate. In this sense, Veblen is fundamentally a realist, albeit one with a finely honed sense of irony and sharp satiric wit. Virtually no one, it seems, has been prepared to confront Veblen in terms of his ideas as a whole.

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Veblen's animating interest was to comprehend and assess what he saw as a fundamental institutional reorganization of capitalism and its attendant culture. Like all great social thinkers, he addressed himself to the understanding of issues and problems posed by the world he lived in, and sought his answers without regard for the reigning orthodoxies of the day. His work begins with the recognition that, in the late 19th century United States, the organization and operation of capitalism had changed beyond any image of it that had been provided in the work of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. The capitalism they had described, in their different ways, was based upon an economy of scarcity. Productive capacity for any given commodity was relatively modest and generally incapable of flooding the market. As a result, competition between manufacturers took place mainly at the level of productive efficiency, with the aim of each manufacturer being to produce as much of a given commodity as possible for the least cost, which meant ruthlessly holding down labor costs. By investing less in the production process, more efficient manufacturers could sell their commodities at lower cost than their competitors, and could therefore hope to capture their rivals' share of the market. The cultural values generated by the institutional dynamics of this system and by the underlying Protestant Ethic--thrift, industriousness, self-denial, and respect for w o r k - - w e r e consistent with its focus on productivity. At some point during the latter part of the 19th century, however, improvements in machine technology achieved what Veblen regarded as a pivotal development in human history: for the first time it became possible to produce nearly unlimited quantities of virtually any commodity. Productive capacity had reached the point where the values on which the entire economy was based were reversed, now resting on abundance rather than scarcity. This reversal fundamentally changed the organizing principles of capitalism and its logics of production and modes of distribution. Veblen took as the central problem of his studies to comprehend the operation, institutional processes, and cultural implications of this new spirit and organization of capitalism. He saw that industrialists, engineers, and others who were proficient at producing goods had been displaced as the movers of the capitalist system by businessmen, accountants, bankers, and managers of money. The new business spirit, he saw, was dedicated not to productive efficiency but to speculations in value and the inhibition of productive capacity for the purpose of controlling prices ("industrial sabotage"). This meant that the locus of business competition shifted from productive efficiency to the competitive distribution of goods, resulting, among other things, in vast energies and resources being devoted to the persuasions of salesmanship and advertising. 3 These new institutional principles led to the erosion of the cultural values and orientations of the older capitalism and encouraged new orientations toward conspicuous consumption and waste among expanding social strata.

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Veblen first noticed these new cultural orientations emerging among wealthy robber barons and "captains of industry," but his central concept of emulation contains the understanding that these same value orientations would penetrate the middle and working classes as well. His image of society is one in which everyone looks to and emulates everyone else in the mistaken belief, or hope, that others know what the appropriate cultural standards are. No one does, of course, since those being emulated are, in turn, emulating others. Cultural standards that might serve as internalized supports for the personality and guides for personal conduct are eroded and replaced by mere fashion. Veblen shows us the institutional underpinnings not of a society organized around functional "core values," but of one that is largely devoid of any real cultural values and standards at all, a truly "other directed" civilization. It is not at all difficult to find in his analysis a major source of the cultural lacunae of the contemporary middle classes, who devote endless energies to an ethic of consumption in the competition for status. It is true that, by exposing the irrationalities and wastefulness that are endemic features of the American political economy, Veblen's work suggests that some sweeping changes might be practical. But Veblen himself offered no real blueprints for the good society (as Tilman makes clear, his image of a soviet of engineers cannot be taken seriously) and was criticized by many on the left for failing to even formulate policy initiatives that might serve to bring about reforms. He did not do so because Veblen was not, at heart, a reformer or radical seeking to change the world, but an intellectual attempting to make sense of it. Veblen's realistic perspective and personal detachment gave him an angle of vision that was independent of the conceptual and normative universe of modern capitalism itself. His detachment can be seen in, or perhaps was the product of, several of his methodological strategies. For example, Veblen frequently used the cultural standards of the Protestant Ethic, as they were expressed in and nurtured by 18th and 19th century small town economic values, as a prism through which to view the operations of the modern capitalist economy. Thus, he often employed such values as frugality, industriousness, use value, devotion to work, etc. as criteria for assessing the institutional performance and cultural orientations of the emergent business civilization. He often expressed these values in more general concepts as well, referring to them as the "instinct of workmanship," the "parental bent," "idle curiosity," and a concern for "human serviceability." By examining the performance of modern capitalism from the perspective of these values, Veblen was able to both highlight and assess aspects of its operation. Thus, these older cultural values served him both as heuristic models and as standards of evaluation for pointing to fundamental shifts in the social ordering of industrial society.

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Veblen also gained distance from his subject by his cultivation of an ethnographic attitude. Veblen was familiar with and appreciative of the work of Boas, Tylor, Frazer, Morgan and other anthropologists, and often illustrated his points with reference to anthropologists' descriptions of the lifestyles and values of pre-industrial cultures. Much of Veblen's characteristic wit can be seen to derive from his ethnographic ability to approach familiar social actions and institutions as somehow strange and alien. His accounts of the practices of businessmen, university presidents, and even professional economists often read as if he were describing tribal headhunters engaged in exotic rites. For example, Veblen twitted conservative economists by suggesting that they behave in ways that are not fundamentally different than the priesthood of an animistic cult. Just as primitive peoples attributed human values and qualities to animals, trees and other inanimate objects, classical and neoclassical economists attribute causality to the "unseen hand," equilibrium as a market norm, and supposed laws of "natural" wages. In their desire to validate the value of their "rational" understanding of market operations, Veblen suggested, economists resort to unverifiable sources of causation. Finally, Veblen's capacity for detachment from the prevailing canon of his time is supported by his employment of Darwinian evolutionary biology and by his use of what were then the findings of psychology. His use of the concepts of these fields did not and were not intended to clothe him with the credibility of science, but were acts of perversity4 meant to display his command of useless knowledge and to flaunt the serious pretentiousness and "scientific" certainty of his colleagues.5 Veblen's dismissal of conventional economics as "pre-Darwinian," by which he meant animistic, taxonomic, and teleological, was Veblen's unique way of exposing those of his colleagues' ideological and theoretical predispositions that led them to pay insufficient attention to empirical realities. In most other instances, it is usually difficult to take Veblen's tone of scientific seriousness at face value. The meaning he gives to the term "instincts," for example, does not refer to immutable biological propensities but to acquired cultural orientations. His references to such racial categories as "dolichocephalic blonds" can only be regarded by any discerning reader as a spoof of the complex racial categories based on cranial capacity, hair type, and other aspects of physical appearance that were then in vogue in anthropology and in the field of eugenics.6 It would appear that Veblen's vision was so out of sync with the prevailing norms of scientific belief that none of his contemporaries could comprehend the full extent of his rejection of their fundamental assumptions. Now that most of those older assumptions have also been rejected by contemporary science, Veblen's modus operandi gives his work new significance for contemporary readers, for the underlying assumptions of his theories are as valid today as they were then.

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As Tilman makes clear, Veblen's critics among professional economists have been sorely irked by his use of scientific rhetoric and by the scholarly pose of "colorless objectivity" (Knight, p. 49) which he struck even as he satirized and mocked their theories. Indeed, his critics have sometimes gone to great lengths to denounce his lack of scientific precision and objectivity. However, by taking Veblen's irony seriously, such objections as these misunderstand his purpose. Despite his appropriation of the scientific rhetoric of his day, Veblen understood that economic "science" was an interpretive scholarly endeavor that could not be fitted into the measured "laws" and formulations of science. Indeed, long before Kuhn, 7 Veblen saw that all scientific work, social as well as natural, is guided by underlying assumptions about the world. In light of this understanding, Veblen's perspective was not really that of a scientist, but of an anthropologist of the American political economy. His use of scientific rhetoric was mainly his way of poking fun at the scientific pretentiousness by which his colleagues concealed their animistic beliefs even from themselves. What Veblen's rival economists objected to, at bottom, was not so much his lack of objectivity, but the fact that he equated them with primitives who, like economists, invested their need for order and moral significance in their own magical and supernatural versions of an "unseen hand." Veblen spoofed economists' claims for the scientific status of their work, which they required as a basis of professional and personal self-legitimation. Veblen regarded the self-assured confidence of economists in their science as errant gall. 8 Although Tilman does not directly address it, a more substantive source of the critical rejection of Veblen is that his work challenges the intellectual and ideological paradigms on which the work of both conservative and radical economists is based. Veblen's fundamental insight is that, as result of its new productive proficiency, modern capitalism had been qualitatively transformed, leading both to a structural reorganization of the political economy and to a need for a new understanding of the "laws" according to which capitalism functions. For Veblen, this meant that classical and neoclassical as well as Marxist assumptions and theories address a form of capitalism that no longer exists (if, indeed, it ever did), and that their conceptual armories are inadequate to the task of comprehending the new form it has taken. The hedonistic calculus and precepts of classical liberalism, Veblen argues, fail to describe the conduct of predatory businessmen in the new civilization of industrial capitalism. Thoroughly discounting the internal contradictions on which Marx placed his hopes for revolutionary change, Veblen saw that all classes, including the workers, could and would be coopted by the largess of the new industrial productive system. The way to understand the modem political economy, Veblen demonstrates by his own example, is to subject it to a fresh

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empirical reexamination. But for his many critics, it was easier to criticize Veblen's efforts from the vantage of threadbare ideological paradigms. It is for this reason that Tilman found it necessary to write this book as the first volume of his trilogy. It is a fitting testament to the originality and freshness of Veblen's analysis of capitalism that so many critics of all persuasions saw fit to defend their own outworn presuppositions by attacking it. Tilman makes one major error in judgment when, almost as an afterthought, he invidiously compares Veblen with Marx and Weber. In his preface to this book, Tilman states that "probably few would claim [that Veblen] is comparable to Marx or Weber as a general theorist or seminal thinker. But perhaps," Tilman suggests "he approaches their stature when treated in a specifically American context . . ." (p. xvii). This judgment must be understood in the light of Tilman's solitary and unrewarded work on Veblen during a period when Marx and Weber have been celebrated by American thinkers who have consistently misunderstood, misinterpreted, or ignored the work of Veblen. As a lone spokesman for a maligned thinker, Tilman has apparently been intimidated by the reverence shown to Marx and Weber by the post-sixties generation of American social scientists. Because he has read Veblen and the literature on Veblen with such thoroughness, and therefore cannot have read Marx and Weber in the same depth, he attributes greater wisdom and relevance to them than to Veblen. In making this judgment, Tilman underrates the subject of his life's work, for as an analyst of contemporary capitalism and of its cultural impact, Veblen is at least the equal of Marx and Weber, and in many ways surpasses their analyses. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that Veblen, more than Marx or Weber, is the preeminent analyst of the modern world, especially to the extent that the United States has defined the terms of late 20th century civilization. Veblen's analysis points more directly to the dimensions of 20th century corporate capitalism than that of either Marx or Weber. Marx, who thought the revolution was imminent, did not imagine that capitalism could adapt, adjust, and survive its own internal contradictions, and so did not anticipate a new class of business predators who could control the industrial enterprise. Although Weber understood that capitalism can take many forms, and analyzed the varieties of its expression throughout history, he located the rise of modern capitalism in the Protestant Ethic. Weber recognized that the Protestant Ethic was no longer a needed underpinning for a capitalism that had now gained its own operating inertia, but he did not provide a vision of capitalism's future other than that of the "iron cage." In this sense, Veblen's analysis of modern capitalism begins at the point where Weber dropped it.

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Veblen's analysis focuses on a capitalism that has outgrown the cultural values that nurtured it in its infancy. It now operates on the basis of its own priorities and criteria, and sets its stamp on industrial civilization by disregarding all older cultural values and orientations without regard to their continuing ethnic, class, or historical force. Whereas the whole thrust of Weber's analysis of modernity points toward an increasingly rationalized economy, Weber did not recognize the systematic irrationalities which Veblen found in the "imbecile institutions" and pecuniary calculus of the price system, including its irresponsible ecological wastefulness, its disregard for the management of resources in relation to human needs ("human serviceability"), and its periodic overexpansion of loan credit which provides the society with the illusion that all participate in a life that promises a better and better future. With respect to the latter issue, Veblen's understanding of the operation of modern capitalism surpasses that of Marx and Weber, for of the three, only Veblen appreciates the importance of credit for sustaining peoples' hopes that they can live off something other than their own work. Veblen also compares favorably with Marx and Weber with respect to their conceptions of appropriate societal ends. Marx, of course, held a naive utopian vision of a happy, unalienated communism in which social ends and personal interests would be identical. Weber, more of a hard-headed realist, recognized that exploiting natural resources to attain capitalist growth for its own sake was ultimately meaningless, 9 and he despaired over the fate of the human spirit in a rationalized world. But Weber's conception of how the society would or should be shaped was unspecified. While rejecting Marx's idealistic image of the future, Veblen, in his concept of the "parental bent," insisted that political and economic leaders should exercise some sense of responsibility for humanity's future generations. He especially criticized capitalism's profligate use of the earth's resources. "It is a despicably inhuman thing," Veblen wrote, "for the current generation willfully to make the way of life harder for the next generation, whether through neglect of due provision for their subsistence and proper training or through wasting their heritage of resources and opportunity by improvident greed and indolence. ''1~

By comparing the shortsighted pecuniary calculus of corporate business with his sense of its moral obligation to conserve resources, Veblen appears as an early environmentalist standing opposed to the irrational (and in our day, dangerous) wastefulness of an industrial civilization guided by business interests alone. Veblen's work contains a theoretical underpinning for what may well become the decisive civilizational issue of the next century. If one were to take seriously all of the values Veblen expresses in his work and make them the basis of a new social order, we would be left with a thoroughly dull and spiritless society, one devoid of conspicuous consumption,

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invidious status distinctions, competitive sports, advertising, all manner of media hoopla, institutional pomp and ceremony, mutual emulation, and numerous other forms of spectacle and ceremony. It would be a world of relentless realism, lacking illusions, religious or otherwise. A rigid matter-of-factness would be the governing norm of social relations. A consistent moral commitment to use values alone would lead inevitably to a world bereft of the irrational passions and enthusiasms that penetrate and invigorate our matter-of-fact routine. This monotonous sameness, colored only in shades of gray, would be broken only by differences in wit and intelligence, which would be given free sway as the only measure of social d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n - a completely cerebral society made to order for Veblen's greatest talents. The foibles, passions, irrationalities, religious faiths, and fears of humankind would make it impossible for a n y o n e - - e x c e p t perhaps for Veblen h i m s e l f - - t o live in this joyless cross between Marx's communism and Weber's iron cage. As Tilman's book demonstrates, Veblen's "utopia" and the values on which it is constructed have made easy targets for his critics, most of whom have responded viscerally to this aspect of his work without confronting it directly. However, criticism of Veblen's values is not an acceptable substitute for addressing the substance of his analysis. Veblen's vision of the good society, or Marx's or Weber's, must be sharply distinguished from the value of his, or their, analysis of capitalism. Veblen did not intend or expect the world to be reformed in the image of his values, and indeed, he was fully aware that the few concrete proposals that he did offer were impracticable. 11 Veblen's values served him not as a basis social reform but as a wedge with which to pry open and expose the prevailing norms and practices of contemporary capitalism. Criticism of Veblen's values, lifestyle, and images of the "good" society do not address his ideas or his substantive conclusions, and are therefore merely methodological a t t a c k s - - t h e last resort of criticism. It is with the validity of his conclusions and with the substantive analysis on which they are based that any genuine critique of Veblen's work must contend. Judging from the critics treated by Tilman, no one has yet hit the mark. For us, the relevance of Veblen's work is to be found in the insights it offers for our understanding of the contemporary world. Can Veblen's analysis still be useful in helping us to understand capitalism some 70 years after he studied it? Since Veblen's day the political economy has undergone many changes, most notably the vastly increased scale of governmental involvement in the economy and the deeper globalization of trade, credit, and war. Veblen did not and could not have anticipated Roosevelt's New Deal and the Keynesianism on which it came to be based, but he would not be surprised to learn that governmental economic policy, while something new, has been appropriated as a preserve of the business community. Those who

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have argued that Veblen has no theory of the state have failed to see that, for him, business and the state are virtually synonymous. Throughout his work, he notes the relationship between trade and war and examines the complex interrelations between the world credit system, exploitation of the "common man" (or masses), and ultimately, the recourse of the business community to xenophobic nationalism to protect its interests. Veblen's analysis of these issues remains as astute as ever. In addition, the recent savings and loan scandals, the ever more frequent reports of corporate malfeasance and illegality, the 1980s frenzy of corporate mergers and takeovers, Wall Street stock trading scandals, and even the federal government's deficit problem are all ideal candidates for a Veblenian analysis. 12 Due to the continuing dependency of the global economy on economic growth and expansion, which requires a deeper and deeper exploitation of the world's natural resources, any economic contraction that leads to no growth violates the promise made by free market capitalism to the world. Everexpanding consumption and waste (especially of military hardware) are necessary both to fulfill that promise and to avoid the societal reordering that Veblen thought to be necessary early in this century. Without such a reordering, the long term secular trend for industrial civilization is for a gradual selfdestruction based on the continuous expansion of a self-defeating system. No one expected or foresaw that the petrochemical and nuclear revolutions on which secular salvation was to be achieved would lead to a radical transformation of the human habitat. The appearance of ozone depletion at the poles, the over exploitation of natural resources such as water, timber, and oil, a possible global warming, further nuclear catastrophes, and the existence of all manner of toxic and nuclear wastes suggest that the problems of the civilization cannot be solved by holding to an attitude of business-as-usual. Veblen recognized that the logic and faith of business prevents it from coping with this structural irrationality of our system, for the system of accountancy-- the pervasive pecuniary calculus--prevents its own replacement by any other mode of social rationality. This central and critical dilemma of modern capitalism remains exactly as Veblen originally described it. In light of the prescience of Veblen's work, Tilman's three volume project is not merely the labor of love of a devoted follower, but a major intellectual event in American social thought. This book resurrects Veblen as a source of inspiration for a new generation of social thinkers for whom the work of the past two generations of social analysts no longer serves as a guide into the f u t u r e - - o r futurelessness--of modern capitalism. While the irrationalities of the business civilization have outpaced even Veblen's expectations, his work continues to offer a viable social perspective that might provide some guidelines for the formulation of a responsible public policy.

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ENDNOTES

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H e made the same assessment of C. Wright Mills, whom he mistakenly placed in the same category as Vebten. Riesman is not alone, however, in making Veblen's personality central to a discussion of his ideas. Robert L. Heilbroner (The Worldly Philosophers, NY: Simon and Schuster, 5th edition, 1980) and Lewis C o s e r (Masters of Sociological Thought, NY: H a r c o u r t B r a c e Jovanovich, Inc., 1971) each devotes a chapter of their respective books to Veblen, focusing as much or more on Veblen's biography and personality than on his ideas. Heilbroner in particular goes to some lengths to paint Veblen as a "neurotic" and "a mass of eccentricities." Still, although Heilbroner and Coser do not fully come to terms with Veblen's ideas, neither goes so far as Riesman in attempting to explain (or dismiss) those ideas as reflections or expressions of his personality. The c o n t e m p o r a r y agricultural e c o n o m y must be considered something of a holdover from the earlier organization of capitalism. Farmers continue to operate on the basis of productive efficiency by attempting maximize their yields while keeping investment and operating costs to a minimum. However, agricultural productivity is greater than ever before, due to mechanization of agricultural production, widespread use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, improved crop rotation techniques, crop watering devices, and other enhancements to the productive process. As a result, farmers annually produce more agricultural products than can be absorbed by domestic markets. Unlike manufacturers, however, farmers have not yet mastered the strategies of "sabotage" and price fixing, due primarily to their geographical distribution and to the fact that ownership of arable farmland is not yet sufficiently concentrated to enable tacit agreements about production standards and pricing to be worked out. If left solely to their own devices, most farmers would be unable to recoup their investment costs on a flooded market and would soon go out of business. However, to prevent the collapse of agricultural production and to preserve the nostalgic image of family farmers, the federal g o v e r n m e n t has instituted remedial policies such as "set-aside" programs (which effectively "sabotage" production rates by removing a portion of land from production) and price subsidies (which fix prices for farm products at artificially high levels relative to what the market would otherwise bear). The effect of such federal policies is essentially to save farmers from their own strategy of productive efficiency, which is counterproductive in a pecuniary sense in an age of high productivity relative to production costs.

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Such acts were completely in character for Veblen. For example, even while still a student at Carleton College, Veblen satirically assaulted the canons and conventions of the science of his day by delivering a paper on "Noses." According.to Dorfman (Thorstein Veblen and His America, NY: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966 [1934]; p. 32), the paper "seems to have been a burlesque on Galton's attempt to correlate anatomical facial differences with character . . . [Veblen] submitted an elaborate classification, and attempted to deduce the character of the individual from the shape and other peculiarities of the nose." During a weekly rhetorical at Carleton, Veblen caused a stir by delivering "A Plea for Cannibalism," and shocked the pious teetotalers with "An Apology for a Toper." On yet another occasion, after the official critic of a literary society meeting dismissed the presented papers as brief and poor in quality, Veblen spent forty minutes at the next meeting reading in a "dreary monotone" a tome on the philosophy of Mill. The critic admitted that the paper was "sufficiently long and sufficiently deep" (Dorfman, p. 33). Examples may be found in several lengthy statistical footnotes which Veblen includes In The Theory of Business Enterprise (NY: Augustus M. Kelley, Bookseller, 1965 [1904]), pp. 95, 168-70, 203-04, 233. Statistical references are exceptional in the whole of Veblen's work, which suggests that these complex footnotes were written with tongue firmly in cheek. In addition to the spoof of eugenics represented by his paper on "Noses" (see footnote #4), Veblen also offers a deadpan putdown of the field in a footnote in The Instinct of Workmanship (NY: Augustus M. Kelley 1964 [1914]; p. 141): "The caution is perhaps unnecessary that it is not hereby intended to suggest a doubt of Mr. Galton's researches or to question the proposals of the Eugenicals, whose labours are no doubt to be taken for all they are worth." Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). A major source of strain in American politics stems from the belief of politicians that economic theory, whether conservative or liberal, can be relied upon to resolve problems in the economic, social, and political orders. In part, the viability of the "economic advisor" rests on a social psychological function: to provide hope that solutions to those problems exist. "This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last tone of fossilized coal is burnt."

Veblen, Weber and Marx on Political Economy

10. 11.

12.

505

From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 181. The Instinct of Workmanship (NY: Augustus M. Kelley, Bookseller, 1904), p. 26. For example, Veblen declares disarmingly that to rehabilitate the state of higher learning in the universities, "All that is required is the abolition of the academic executive and of the governing board." This conclusion, stated at the end of The Higher Learning in America (NY: Augustus M. Kelley, Bookseller, 1965 [1918], p. 276), follows a lengthy analysis showing how the "sterilization" of the universities results from the advance of the business civilization. He knows full well that his proposal has no chance of being enacted. Similarly, in The Engineers and the Price System (NY: Viking, 1954, p. 155-57), Veblen declares that in order to create "a more practicable system of industrial production and distribution . . . all that is necessarily involved is a disallowance of absentee ownership." This elegantly simple step would "apply indiscriminately to all industrially useful objects, whether realty or personality, whether natural resources, equipment, banking capital, or wrought goods in stock." The radical nature of Veblen's simple proposal, especially when read in context, makes clear that he knew his proposal would not be taken seriously. Such an analysis may be found in Arthur J. Vidich, "Veblen and the Post-Keynesian Political Economy," International Review of Sociology, pp. 151-181, New Series, No. 3, 1992, included in a Monograph Section dedicated to The Social Theory and Contemporary Relevance

of Thorstein Veblen.