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Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Veblen was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and he grew up in rural Minnesota.
He did not learn to speak English until he was a teenager.
He received a B.A. from Carleton College in 1880 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1884. At Yale, he developed a friendship with his sociology professor, William Graham Sumner, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Immanuel Kant in the area of Moral Philosophy.
In 1882, he started to teach political economy at the University of Chicago. He became known as a brilliant and eccentric thinker and an unconventional teacher. At the University of Chicago he gained a reputation as an insightful social critic, and it was during his years in Chicago that he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class.
He taught political economy and later became editor of theJournal of Political Thought.
He taught at Stanford from 1906-1909 and at the University of Missouri from 1911-1918.
In 1919 he became a founding member of the New School for Social Research in New York.
He died in 1929 of heart disease.
The exigencies of the struggle for means of life are less
exacting for [the leisure] class than for any other; and as a
consequence of this privilege position we should expect to
find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society
to the demands which the situation makes for a further
growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered
industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative
class.
…exigencies do not readily produce in the members of this
class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order
which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and
methods of life that have become habitual to them. The
office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard
the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent….
Main Point 1: The leisure class is
conservative, finding no reason to support
changes, because they enjoy the status quo
and are little affected by economic pressures.
Main Points 3: The example of the leisure class fosters conspicuous consumption, which diverts resources away from sustenance of the lower classes.
- The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption of goods considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after the more imperative physical needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is that the requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical necessities of life have been provided for. (^) What is a living wage? Why is there starvation?
Main Point 4: Since the leisure class discourages
change, it hinders evolutionary progress.
…the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which prevailed at some point in the past development. The institution of a leisure class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still farther out of adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the immediate past.
