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PARTISAN REVIEW
tual, like the sentimental, contribution of Thorstein Veblen is compli–
cated and compelling.
Veblen was already in his forties when he brought out
The Theory
of the Leisure Class,
so that it is not surprising that his first book sug–
gests most of the themes he was to develop later. But the book has
too long been taken as the sum of Veblen's thought, which it isn't;
the fine anthologies of Wesley Mitchell and Max Lerner,
What Veblen
Taught
and the
Viking Portable Veblen,
give a much better view of
the rounded social theorist than anyone of his books can do. What
the
Leisure Class
volume does show is the wide net with which Veblen
was able to capture every aspect of our living and put all our habits
in his economic museum. In his singleness of purpose, he was something
like Thoreau, who wanted "to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness
of it, and publish its meanness to the world"; but, unlike his Concord
precursor, he never committed himself to the judgment that economy
was a matter of individual choice or an instrument of human culture.
Veblen's hut at Cedro had many resemblances to Thoreau's hut at
Walden, but between them lay a continent that men had crossed under
the assumption, thoroughly American and utterly Darwinian, that the
economic (ultimately the ecological) struggle for existence was the one
surest reality. In finding a style for his own mode of civil disobedience,
Veblen could not possibly have invented a new Thoreauvian purity
for the American language. Style, to him, was cultivated by those who
enjoy
otium cum dignitate.
What he could and did do was take the
undignified lingo of his working colleagues and devise a complex mockery
of academic jargon. He had the endemic professorial blindness to the
sensuous appeal of words and he stubbornly stayed in the realm of
abstraction; but he could not resist the evidence of simple facts and he
could not betray his native wit, and so a style emerged. "Conspicuous
consumption" and "pecuniary emulation" are colloquialisms today, per–
haps even cliches. But when we read of the
performance
of leisure, of
possession as a meritorious
act,
of neighborliness as "an unremitting
demonstration of ability to pay," we are still brought up short to a re–
examination of our mores, if not of our souls. Veblen has the scope,
the complexity, the insight, and occasionally the language of a truly
great satirist. As to any satirist, readers can go to him to confirm their
guilt or their smugness, but our world still presents complacency enough,
and narrowness, oversimplification, superficiality, and dullness enough,
for
The Theory of the Leisure Class
to have an enormous present value.
