Thorstein Veblen

Alex Beam

Not every distinguished man's sex-life is worth researching . . . but Veblen, the enfant terrible of the turn-of-the-century economics profession, ejoyed not just an interesting sex life, as his latest biographers Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen make clear, he enjoyed a life in full....The Jorgensens correctly note that even his most famous writings seem thick and turgid to the modern taste. But he was the rarest of birds in 19th-century America: a dangerous thinker.
— The Boston Globe

Booknews

Reflecting newly released archival material, this biography covers the life of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) whose criticism of American business culture and attacks on other sacred American institutions, not to mention his so-called "womanizing," tweaked the sensibilities of his time. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A conspicuously flawed biography about the subversive economist who coined the term "conspicious consumption.þ Veblen (1857þ1929) wore out welcomes at Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford, the University of Missouri, and the New School School for Social Research (of which he was a co-founder) The trouble was not just that he needled the ostentatious lifestylesþand organizational practicesþof plutocrats in his classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). Rather, his reputation suffered because of "landfill of lies and half-truths" depicting him as an irredeemable womanizer, write the Jorgensens (Eric Berne, Mastergamesman, not reviewed). Drawing on newly opened archives at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Carleton College, Veblen's alma mater, the authors recast him as a chivalric lover who made an ill-advised marriage to his eccentric first wife, Ellen; as an intellect whose unconventional views on equality made him irresistible to women; as a barely solvent academic unable to attain positions worthy of his brilliance because of Ellen's whispering campaigns; and as a sickly old man mourning the loss of his devoted second wife to madness and death. Though they strive admirably to set the record straight, the authors falter. Sometimes their comparisons are ludicrous (e.g., a disciple who lied about Veblen had "something like the mindset of the man who `adored' John Lennon but eventually shot him"). Instead of quoting passages from significant letters that passed between Veblen, Ellen, and a student with whom he fell in love, the Jorgensens reproduce these letters in their entirety, then repeat themin the appendix. Worse, by failing to admit the shortcomings of Veblen's theories, theyþre unable to fully assess his enduring strengths as a skeptic who subjected classical economics to sociology and anthropology and as a writer whose satiric prose evokes comparisons to Wilde. A biography of a "dismal science" practitioner that is itself sort of dismal. (photos, not seen)