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Thorstein Veblen by Anthony M. Ludovici The New English Weekly 27, 1945, pp. 61–62 - p. 61 - By writing what, as far as I know, is the first biography of the genius Thorstein Veblen, * Mr. Joseph Dorfman has laid us all under a great debt. He might perhaps have done the work more artistically; for the reader is often tempted to lay the book down from sheer surfeit, wishing it had been pruned by some one who, loving Veblen less, could have discovered where this almost day-to-day record of his activities palled. Nevertheless, it is a great and conscientious piece of work — a portrait that leaves an unforgettable impression, and it is gratifying to know that the present is already the third edition.         America knows more about Veblen than England does. But not because he was really American. He belonged to Europe by tradition and lineage, and if there is anything in the belief that the relative seniority of the nation from which a man hails accounts for the degree of his ascendancy over any younger people he may confront, Veblen abundantly bears it out. Mr. Dorfman never says this; but he demonstrates it on every page. The whole Academic world of America was clearly junior to Veblen, however much older than he in years many of its members wore when he first startled them with his brilliant flashes of insight. In excusing himself on one occasion for grading some of his students incorrectly, he said: "My grades are like lightning. They are liable to strike anywhere." Be this as it may, his insight certainly had a lightning sharpness and usually revealed, even to tried students of a subject, features they had never suspected.         Veblen did more than break away from the metaphysical, logical and conventional economists who preceded him. For both his quest and his method were different. He never described what should or ought to happen according to supposed laws or rules. He found out what was happening and then, on the lines of the evolutionary principle, and with the aid of anthropology and sociology, described it as the terminal of a course of development in which the final product — like the individual of a species — was found to have borne along with it much that was vestigial and therefore useless. Thus he found in our culture fantastic barbarian survivals influencing our economic relations and usages; and in many of our cherished traditions, he recognized the manifestation of rude ceremonial conventions.         Mr. Dorfman discusses all this with great care and precision and, following Veblen, throughout his career as a teacher and publicist, omits no incident, whether in the social history of the period, or in the life of his hero, which may shed light on the mystery of Veblen's uncanny vision.         It is possible that some of the anthropological and biological aspects of Veblen's teaching may prove to have been unsound. It is not unlikely that here and there exaggeration may be found to have crept into his statement of a case. Many, even during his life-time probably suspected that he lacked a certain quality which men like Ruskin and Morris possessed in a marked degree — the ability to appreciate and to enjoy things of beauty because of their essential superiority, as life-promoting forces, over things of no beauty. It is also probable that many besides myself will be puzzled by his failure to see the factor of feminine ascendancy in the dominance of pecuniary values in Anglo-Saxon culture, especially in America.         * Thorstein Veblen and this America. By JOSEPH DORFMAN. Viking Press, New York, 1940. Royal 8vo. (approx.) pp. 556 with Index and Bibliography, $3.50. - p. 62 -         But he will probably prove to have been right in so much that is important for an understanding and, above all, a mastery of the problems of human society, that his new shortcomings, perplexing as they often are, will seem negligible.         It is true that the present financial captain of industry, who need not necessarily know anything about the product he sells, or about its production, has superseded the old industrial captain who was at once the owner, the organizer, and the knowledgeable tradesman behind his business. It is also true that, in so far as the financial captain of industry organizes his business chiefly in order to excel in salesmanship and in getting something for nothing, he is a liability rather than an asset to the community, and to confound him with the old captain of industry is a pure anachronism. It is true that many of the invidious features of our present pecuniary culture, with its class system, lead inevitably to a policy of conspicuous waste among the favoured few, and that this waste is at the cost of the common man. It is true that much that passes for aesthetic is merely pecuniary value, and I was glad that years before reading Veblen I had not only noted this — in a product, like platinum, for instance — but had also recorded that even gastronomical taste adjusts itself to the purely pecuniary valuation. Nor was it new to me that impressions of human worth themselves, whether of an intellectual, characterological or physical kind, are conditioned among modern people, especially women, by the evidence of pecuniary value. A striking instance of this occurs in the biography itself, and it is the more interesting as Veblen, who never enjoyed pecuniary prestige, and dressed shabbily, is the subject of it. He was being met by one, Bettman, for the first time, and Bettman reports the encounter thus:—         "My first impression of the physical appearance of the stranger was not particularly favourable, by which I mean that it did not give the expectation that I would hear anything particularly interesting or important †. As he spoke I became acutely conscious of the fact that, whoever he was, here was a man of keenest wit and intelligence, clear and picturesque vocabulary, somebody exceptional." After discovering that the visitor was Veblen, Bettman says: "Of course I immediately became doubly alert and interested, and I think I said to Mr. O'Brian . . . that there was the keenest minded person who had come into the department while I was there."         This sort of error due to the dominance of pecuniary values in our culture, as I noted years ago, in "Woman: a Vindication," is excusable in women, among whom it is congenital and sex-linked. But it is unpardonable in men. And yet who is not a Bettman in the Anglo-Saxon world to-day?         Finally, — for I can refer neither to all the vices Veblen discovered in our culture, nor to their evolution as he traced it — it is true that those whose interest and energy are not directed solely to pecuniary gain tend to be either eliminated, or else depressed in the social scale; it is probably true that, in the mass of the people, our modern pecuniary culture is weakening the instinct of race solidarity, the sense of truthfulness and equity and the instinct of workmanship; and it is also true that, as a business principle itself, salesmanship is fast superseding workmanship as a means of securing markets. Every day one sees handbags, shoes, boots, clothes, cutlery etc., all of which are evidence of miracles of salesmanship, but which, in their workmanship, reveal only the miracle of displaying just the precise maximum of shoddiness that a long-suffering public will bear.         This seems but a thin slice of Veblenism, but I hope enough to persuade readers to obtain Mr. Dorfman's biography, and if possible to turn to Veblen's original works themselves. Among those I would strongly recommend are, "Absentee Ownership and business Enterprise in Recent Times," "The Vested Interests and The Common Man," and "The Theory of The Leisure Class" — all published by George Allen and Unwin. Of the two photographs of Veblen in the book, the first, evidently taken by a camera too close up to the subject, gives a bad impression of the proportions of Veblen's features.         † The italics are mine. — A.M.L.

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