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Part of a series presenting critical appraisals of influential economists from the age of Aristotle to the present. The individuals examined have shaped both the theory and practice of modern economics. Each volume combines classic statements by economists with the most recent research. ... Read more

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Citation Details
Title: Durkheim and Veblen on the social nature of individualism. (Notes and Communications).(Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) compared with Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929))
Author: Rick Tilman
Publication: Journal of Economic Issues (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2002
Publisher: Association for Evolutionary Economics
Volume: 36Issue: 4Page: 1104(7)

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Customer Reviews (5)

Quaint, strange, and honest
This biography is a strange book, filled with speculation and brash interjections of personal opinion. Characters and events and sometimes even objects are sometimes introduced with nary an explanatory introduction. Texts of letters are dropped into the manuscript with no warning or context. The reader thus must navigate the lack of editorial work in this book while still appreciating its general thesis: that Veblen's first wife, Ellen May Rolfe, blackened his name and reputation by writing directly to university directors and reporting Veblen's natural and wholly rational estrangement from her to them.

They have done a heroic thing in correcting the view of Veblen as a womanizer. Instead, he seems a gentle, misunderstood, deeply attractive man who wouldn't have deliberately hurt or injured a fly. It is ironic that Veblen himself, in his personal life, seems anything but a firebrand: his wives and loves, on the other hand, were passionate, unstable, and tartly outspoken; both of his wives were feminists and socialists.

Interestingly, his first wife, Ellen, appears to have been plagued with instability and mild forms of mental illness; his crush, Sarah, was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown; a woman he was rumored (and only rumored) to have had an affair with committed suicide; and his second wife, Ann (Babe), went actually mad and was hospitalized for more than a year due to her mental illness. We see women and, in a few cases, men surrounding Veblen with the goal of supporting, protecting, nurturing, and caring continually for the Great Man, even at the expense of their own well being and mental health. Still, one cannot blame Veblen for having inspired this effect on the part of others. He was an exceptional person, and some people appear to enjoy making exceptions for the truly exceptional.

Many questions remain unanswered about Veblen and his personal life. It seems that a truly coherent, cohesive, and definitively honest account of this man's personal life has yet to be written.

Reviews from The Int'l Journal of Politics, Culture,&Society
Excerpts from the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 13 #2, Winter, `99:``Though not entirely successful in depicting the `essential' Veblen . . . .[this new Veblen biography] is essentialreading for students and scholars of Veblen. It cannot replace Dorfman'sbut it deserves equal billing,'' Clare Virginia Eby. ``Flaws andimperfections notwithstanding . . . . their book has entered the sholarlyliterature on Thorstein Veblen and will henceforth be obligatory readingfor anyone wishing to know him,'' Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia EricksonBartley.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BOOK REVIEW, July 11, 1999
. . . . Stanford alumni Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen have written a clear, engrossing biography that corrects significant errors in previous accounts, but they can't overcome thecentral problem, Veblen himself . .. . Veblen returned to Palo Alto in 1927, 18 years after Stanford fired himfor supposed "immorality." . . . .the signal achievement of thisbook (flawed mainly by the Jorgensens' too-brief sketches of Veeblen'sthought): demonstrating, once and for all, that Veblen was not anunscrupulous womanizer.Though implausible oin its face, that reputationhas gone largely unchallenged for half a century, mostly because EllenVeblen blackened her husband's name so well.

Authors are amazed at the current Veblenian revival
The authors undertook this project because they believed that a man with such cantankerous ideas must have had an interesting life. Those who had written about him before were earnest in their approach but did not conveyan appreciation of his unique personality. Now with the current interest inthe millenium,there seems to be a Veblen revival.The WALL STREETJOURNAL of January 11, 1999, devoted a full page to fifteen of the ``Bestand Brightest Economic Thinkers Who Made a Difference.'' In this Pantheonof those ``who challenged the conventional wisdom'' and whose perceptions``changed the way millions thought and lived'' were Saint Thomas Aquinas,Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen.Other recent accolades to Veblen are found in Adam Goprik's article in theApril 26-May 3, 1999 issue of THE NEW YORKER, and John Carroll's column``Conspicuous Presumption'' in THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE of May 3, 1999Alex Beam of THE BOSTON GLOBE in his colum (April 21, 1999) entitled ``TheLove Song of Thorstein Veblen'' had this to say about out book:Heobserved that he was turned off by books that sort of dragged the sex lifesof their subjects in by the heels, and said: ``Not every distinguishedman's sex life is worth researching. . . . But Veblen, the enfant terribleof the turn-of-the century economics profession, enjoyed not just aninteresting sex life, as his latest biographers Elizabeth and HenryJorgensen make clear, he enjoyed his life in full. ``There can be no suchthing as a dull biography of Veblen, and this one does not disappoint. ``The man who would later anathematize the titans of capital was a cradlecontrarian . . . While Sioux marauders were killing fellow Norwegianhomesteaders in Minnesota during the 1860s the boy Thorstein sided with theIndians. . . . [He was also] A-religious--- `If there is a differencebetween religion and magic I have never seen it.' [Thus] Veblen disdainedhsi family's prairie Lutheranism and mocked the pieties of America's goldenage.``He was at heart an anthropologist. THE THEORY OF THE LEISURECLASS represents field work among the grandees who sent their children tothe universities where he taught, and among his censorious in-laws. . . .His trenchant analysis of what came to be called male chauvinism in hisessay, `The Barbarian Status of Women,' made him ever more unpopular. Escept perhaps, among women.``Veblen attracted intelligent women, whoshared his contempt for male ritual.Even for the serious-mindedJorgensens, it seems impossible to separate Veblen's life story from hislove stories.His first wife, Ellen Rolfe, destroyed his academic careerby tattling about her husband's affairs to the presidents of Stanford andthe University of Chicago.After trudging all night through a blizzard tovisit his second wife [-to-be] in `Nowhere,' Idaho, Veblen contacted doublepneumonia, which crippled him for life.``The Jorgensens correctly notethat even his most famous writings seem thick and turgid to the moderntaste. But he was the rarest of birds in 20th-century Amderica: a dangerousthinker.''

LONG overdue
Thorstein Veblen's reputation has not fared well in the hands of his biographers.The worst bio by far ("Thorstein Veblen and his America" written by Joseph Dorfman in 1934) has sat in libraries likeso much toxic waste waiting to mislead another scholar.
Between1993-95, Veblen's Minnesota childhood home was restored at great troubleand expense.Like most scholars, the restorers started with Dorfman andimmediately discovered how full of inaccuracies it was.Then the lettersof Andrew Veblen (Thorstein's older and "respectable" brother)were discovered.They were written to protest the distortions of Dorfman'smanuscript.They were extremely accurate and eventually would guidevirtually every aspect of the restoration.

It was only a matter oftime before a new generation of Veblen bios would be written based on thenew information.Rick Tilman's "Intellectual Legacy.." was thefirst, and in many ways the best.But his book was written for seriousVeblen scholars.
The new Jorgensen bio is not at all daunting.It iswell-written, well-research and very enjoyable to read.It focuses on thesignificant women in Thorstein's life--his amazing mother, his charmingsister Emily, his quite crazy first wife, and his extremely helpful secondwife.

This emphasis would not have been my first choice, but sinceTBV was the only political economist of his age who would be remotelyacceptable to a modern feminist, it was certainly appropriate.In fact,the Jorgensens seem to believe that of all the "heresies" thatgot Veblen in hot water, his enlightened views on women in society werepossibly the most problematic.

Outstanding!Every person who hasever been remotely interested in Veblen should read this book. ... Read more

Product Description
Thorstein Veblen shook the complacency of America in the early twentieth century with his incisive criticisms of our social and economic systems. Discarding the classical view of "eternal" economic laws that conveniently justified the nineteenth-century predatory practices of "big business" in terms of rational self-interest, Veblen cast a fresh, merciless eye on America's money-making passion.

In glittering prose, Veblen exposed our social system as one designed to block man's natural "instinct of workmanship." He demonstrated that our leisure-class culture fostered the myth that work was inherently irksome to man. Veblen was also fascinated by the machine and the new science of technology. He saw businessmen basically at war with engineers and scientists because making exorbitant profits did not necessarily jibe with making better goods.

In his study of this intriguing personality, Thorstein Veblen, Douglas Dowd reveals that Veblen was unsuccessful in his university career and his two marriages, and in his private life was strange, bitter, and detached. But in his books, Veblen shone as one of America's most penetrating thinkers whose theories proved a potent force in the modernization of economics as a science. Dowd's sympathetic approach to Veblen's nature and problems places this giant in the field against a contemporary background in powerful and lively fashion. In his new introduction, Michael Keaney breathes new life into this unjustly neglected primer on Veblen. A new generation of students will undoubtedly benefit from this comprehensive guide to the thought of someone whose intellectual endeavor was non-doctrinaire and constantly changing. ... Read more

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Scholars attempting to place Veblen in a particular intellectual tradition will only succeed in reaping frustration and confusion until it is recognized that he was primarily sui generis and eclectic. This is the recurring theme that is made explicit in the introduction, conclusion, and some of the chapters of this work. Veblen was a thinker of such depth and power that he was able to create his own intellectual paradigm. The result of his endeavors is that more than a few intellectuals including his followers, the institutional economists, have spent their careers trying to understand the paradigm and to develop it in several directions for their own purposes. ... Read more

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1999 is the 100th year anniversary of the publication of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class.This volume commemorates and celebrates Veblen's seminal contribution to the analysis of consumerist capitalism and assesses the book's relevance to the twenty-first century.

Veblen's book was a pioneering effort to come to terms with industrial capitalism's consumer culture, and it became the foundation for much of contemporary institutional economics.This book examines Veblen's contribution to the analysis of the new global economy, the growth of the women's movement, inequality, consumption and gambling at the turn of the century.It concludes by analyzing the effects of the globalization of capitalism.

This book will be of great interest to scholars of the history of economic thought and particularly those interested in how we can relate Veblen's classic work to society today and in the future. ... Read more

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Veblen was an original thinker, responsible for introducing and popularizing a host of important concepts and insights. He ignited controversy not only in economics, but also in sociology, history and political science. The number and quality of the responses to his work provide evidence of the novelty and explanatory power of his ideas. These comprehensive volumes will enable the reader to sample the broad spectrum of Veblen’s thought and that of his critics and interpreters. They include critical appraisals of the corpus of his published work as well as reinterpretations of his life and influence on the social sciences particularly, economics, political science and sociology.

This authoritative collection includes reprints of materials previously published by leading scholars on nearly every aspect of Veblen’s life and work. It will be invaluable to professional scholars and graduate students who wish to heighten their understanding of the alternatives to formalism in the social studies. ... Read more

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Text includes Thorstein Veblen's thoughts on the instability of knowledge and belief, the technology of predatory culture, sabotage, patriotism, the barbarian status of women, and credit culture. Introductory chapter contends that Veblen may be considered the first genuine sociologist of consumer society. Hardcover, softcover available. ... Read more

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A close reading of Thorstein Veblen's work shows that he predicted not only the rise of fascism in Japan and Germany, and the Depression, but more contemporary issues, as well as the dangers involved in mixing conservatism, technology, and military power. ... Read more