Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was an American economist and social theorist, born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrant farmers and raised in a Norwegian-speaking community in Minnesota. He studied at Carleton College and took a doctorate in philosophy at Yale in 1884, then studied economics at Cornell. He taught at the University of Chicago, where he edited the Journal of Political Economy, and later at Stanford, the University of Missouri and the New School for Social Research. His books include The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and The Instinct of Workmanship (1914).
Frequently Cited
“In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.”
The Theory of the Leisure Class, published by Macmillan in New York in 1899, is Thorstein Veblen's study of how wealth, status and consumption shape economic life and taste. Written while he taught at the University of Chicago, during the Gilded Age of American fortunes, it treats the habits of the rich not as personal vices but as institutions with a long evolutionary history, and it describes them in a dry, ironic scientific vocabulary that made the book famous.
