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cannot give answers. He handles Veblen's theoretical propositions with
informed deftness, giving us a fine running comment on twentieth–
century social thought. He offers shrewd insight into Veblen's character
and his curious likeness to those other village iconoclasts, Mark Twain
and Benry Ford. But, except on one count, he leaves us wondering
whether there wasn't something in Veblen's work that challenged him
to write this critique. Riesman makes it clear that Veblen's irreverence
and his celebration of idle curiosity still stand as a landmark of intel–
lectual freedom in a land where pragmatic scholarship and practical
science keep so many of the best minds going round in narrow circles.
He also states that what Veblen does for our discursive understanding
is less important than his "brilliant re-invention of irony as a mode of
approach to theoretical questions"; but he never really fills out the
statement, never quite redresses for the ironist his negative findings on
the theoretician. He is so thoroughly aware that Veblen may bring out
false emotions in a reader, "the fear, not of failure, but of success,"
the old "quasi-religious dichotomy between success and saving one's
soul, or one's integrity," that he never tries to mine the deep vein of
Veblen's irony. His explanation by example is weak: his own sardonic
talent is mainly spent on Robert Hutchins as a Captain of Erudition,
but at a time when Hutchins is no longer his boss at the University of
Chicago. Speaking of Veblen's method, he not quite wittily observes
that the "constant shift of perspectives, which allows Veblen to claim
a kind of innocent originality of view, reminds us of the boy who saw
that the king was naked-but perhaps did not understand the symbolism
by which the courtiers were saying the same thing." The modern pro–
fessor is likely, to be sure, to be the emperor's courtier, and the new
complexity with which he sees and talks has a self-preserving bent
much healthier than Veblen's faculty for petty martyrdoms, but the un–
derlying population will undoubtedly go on believing that the emperor
and the childish critic of his clothes are the essential characters of the
tale and that courtiers aren't really so hard to understand.
Like every ironist, Veblen was essentially a moralist. The world he
constructed out of anthropological speculation and socialist economics
engendered his peculiar fable of gentle savages, predacious barbarians,
and matter-of-fact technicians. In a society where aggressiveness and
competitive prowess took all the prizes and all the praise, he lavished
a half-covert affection on the primitive and vulgar trait of "amiable
inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud." He noted the
"habitual bellicose frame of mind" to which competitive acquisition
may lead, and he denied an ethical distinction between robber barons
