BOO KS
217
THE PARADOX OF VEBLEN
THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS. By Thorstein Veblen. With on
introduction by C. Wright Mills. New Americon librory. $.35.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN. By David Riesmon. Scribner's. $3.00.
The legend of Thorstein Veblen seriously interferes with his
reputation. The legend was succinctly recorded back in 1936 when
John Dos Passos drew his portrait of the good gray ironist for
U.
S.
A.:
"He suffered from woman trouble and the constitutional inability to
say yes and an unnatural tendency to feel with the workingclass instead
of with the profittakers." Veblen's charismatic traits have made him an
ambiguous culture hero for discontented intellectuals, a highbrow
Humphrey Bogart type. Besides the woman-winning, disaffected and
recalcitrant humanitarian, there is another Veblen whose subtler image
presides over the whole of Dos Passos' giant novel, the man who in–
sistently cut through the official versions of American life to what was
really going on. The force of his ranging imagination and critical intel–
ligence keeps Veblen's reputation growing and his books in print and
makes it possible that, as the apostolic succession of his disciples and
students die off, a new generation step into their place. The latest
advancement of Veblenite learning thus occurs under the auspices of
two of the country's most interesting younger social analysts: C. Wright
Mills has provided a glowing introduction to the paper-back printing
of Veblen's first masterpiece
The Theory of the Leisure Class,
and
DaVid Riesman has given us, in his
Thorstein Veblen,
the first full–
length critical synthesis to come out of a generation of steady scholar–
ship. Mills' impassioned praise and Riesman's flat "I am not a devotee
of Veblen" denote radical differences of temperament and valuation;
but Mills concedes that Veblen sometimes "obscures and distorts" and
almost always ignores the structure of social power, and Riesman ac–
knowledges that Veblen "steadily recalls us to the study of funda–
mentals, even if they are not the same fundamentals that attracted
him." The ambivalence of the
critics
is sufficient warning that the
paradoxes of their subject remain unsolved, but the urgency with which
they take their stands gives us notice that Veblen is still a present force
in our cultural life.
If
we haven't approached anything like finality in
our assessment, the reason lies in his extraordinary fertility of ideas,
both wrong and right; and if we can't put aside the Veblen problem,
it
is
because of our continuing sense that right ideas predominate
in
his work and carry an import which we dare not neglect. The intellec-
