Veblen, Thorstein Bunde
Veblen, Thorstein Bunde (1857–1929)A leading social critic of American industrialism, whose writings inspired so-called institutional economics, and influenced figures such as John Kenneth Galbraith and C. Wright Mills. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen held several university posts, but his formal career was ruined by his outspoken and unconventional behaviour. His often eccentric writings are full of bitter satire and heavy irony and, arguably, their quality eventually suffered from his personal disappointments.
Veblen took the principal ideologies of late 19th-century entrepreneurial capitalism, in particular evolutionism and price theory, and turned them back on the society in which they flourished. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) he drew on fashionable evolutionary anthropology, comparing the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure...
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