The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions by Thorstein Veblen. New York/London. 1917. Macmillan. 404 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - ‘It is the purpose of this inquiry to discuss the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life, but it has been found impracticable to confine the discussion strictly within the limits so marked out. Some attention is perforce given to the origin and the line of derivation of the institution, as well as to features of social life that are not commonly classed as economic. At some points the discussion proceeds on grounds of economic theory or ethnological generalisation that may be in some degree unfamiliar. The introductory chapter indicates the nature of these theoretical premises sufficiently, it is hoped, to avoid obscurity. A more explicit statement of the theoretical position involved is made in a series of papers published in Volume IV of the American Journal of Sociology, on ‘The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labour', ‘The Beginnings of Ownership', and ‘The Barbarian Status of Women.' But the argument does not rest on these - in part novel - generalisations in such a way that it would altogether lose its possible value as a detail of economic theory in case these novel generalisations should, in the reader's apprehension, fall away through being insufficiently backed by authority or data. Partly for reasons of convenience, and partly because there is less chance of misapprehending the sense of phenomena that are familiar to all men, the data employed to illustrate or enforce the argument have by preference been drawn from everyday life, by direct observation or through condition notoriety, rather than from more recondite sources at a farther remove. It is hoped that no one will find his sense of literary or scientific fitness offended by this recourse to homely facts, or by what may at times appear to be a callous freedom in handling vulgar phenomena or phenomena whose intimate place in men's life has sometimes shielded them from the impact of economic discussion. Such premises and corroborative evidence as are drawn from remoter sources, as well as whatever articles of theory or inference are borrowed from ethnological science, are also of the more familiar and accessible kind and should be readily traceable to their source by fairly well-read persons. The usage of citing sources and authorities has therefore not been observed. Likewise the few quotations that have been introduced, chiefly by way of illustration, are also such as will commonly be recognised with sufficient facility without the guidance of citation.' - from the Preface. . .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called 'institutions' and 'technology'. Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen is famous in the history of economic thought for combining a Darwinian evolutionary perspective with his new institutionalist approach to economic analysis. He combined sociology with economics in his masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he argued that there was a fundamental split in society between those who make their way via exploitation and those who make their way via industry. In hunter-gatherer societies, this was the difference between the hunter and the gatherer in the tribe, but in feudalism, it became the difference between the landed gentry and the indentured servant. In society's progressively modernized forms, those with the power to exploit are known as the 'leisure class', defined by a commitment to demonstrations of idleness and a lack of productive economic activity. Veblen maintains that as societies mature, conspicuous leisure gives way to 'conspicuous consumption'. Both are performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. While Veblen was sympathetic to state ownership of industry, he did not support labor movements of the time. Scholars mostly disagree about the extent to which Veblen's views are compatible with Marxism, socialism, or anarchism. Veblen believed that technological developments would eventually lead to a socialist economy, but his views on socialism and the nature of the evolutionary process of economics differed sharply from Karl Marx's. While Marx saw socialism as the immediate precursor to communism and the ultimate goal for civilization to be achieved by the working class, Veblen saw socialism as an intermediate phase in an ongoing evolutionary process in society that would arise due to natural decay of the business enterprise system. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, Veblen made sweeping attacks on production for profit, and the emphasis on the wasteful role of consumption for status found within many of his works greatly influenced socialist thinkers and engineers who sought a non-Marxist critique of capitalism.

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