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Author: Michael Spindler
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2002-05-20
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780745309590
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvaluatesVeblen not just as an economist or a sociologist but as a seminal critic of modern American culture.
Author: David Riesman
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published:
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9781412839976
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a brilliant and unconventional study of one of the most challenging figures in modern social and economic thought. David Riesman has chosen a deliberately personal method of exposition and evaluation, and he is by no means a disciple. He says of Veblen: âI find him more often interesting than attractive, more often pungent than wise.â By approaching Veblen subjectively and in a critical spirit, Riesman has arrived at an estimate of the man that is objective and balanced. Veblen's ideas and attitudes are carefully examined, with particular attention to his conviction that âthe instinct of workmanshipâ was the constructive element in life, and to his fundamental principle of âidle curiosity.â Veblen is seen as a man with a passionate moral sense whose method was irony coupled with research. Riesman makes the interesting point that the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class was episodically a passionate, even revolutionary reformer, in contrast to a career primarily as an intellectual skeptic. Riesman looks behind the ideas, searching for their origins in Veblen's life, with the result that one finishes the book with a genuine sense of the strange man who is its subject. Riesman concludes that Thorstein Veblen is important not so much for his specific contribution to economic thought as for his stance toward the economy and his fellow economists. For us today, Riesman adds, Veblen's great value inheres in his way of seeing. The new introduction by Mestrovic provides an appreciation of Riesman, no less than Veblen. David Riesman is the Henry Ford II Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Harvard University. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University. Among his most important books are The Lonely Crowd; Faces in the Crowd; Individualism Reconsidered; and Constraint and Variety in American Education. His collection, Abundance for What?, confirms his place as the foremost sociologist of education in the modern era. Stjepan G. Mestrovic is a senior social theorist in his own right. He is currently located at Texas A&M University, where he is a professor of sociology.
Author: Stephen Edgell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-06-01
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1317453654
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work discusses the impact and contemporary relevance of the work of Thorstein Veblen, as well as the source of his ideas. It suggests that he was one of the first modern sociologists of consumption whose analysis of contemporary display and fashion anticipated later theories and research.
Author: Rick Tilman
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0826265979
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Tilman argues that evolutionary naturalism provides the philosophical foundations of Veblen's thought. He links evolutionary naturalism to Veblen's aesthetics, secular humanism, sociology of control, sociobiology, and sociology of knowledge, thereby initiating observations regarding the relationship of Veblen's own life to his thinking and his place as a cultural lag theorist"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Sidney Plotkin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-12-06
Total Pages: 373
ISBN-13: 030016338X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThorstein Veblen is best known for his authorship of "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and "The Theory of Business Enterprise," which made him a celebrated figure in the fields of economics and sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. In this book, Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman argue that in addition to his well-known work in these fields Veblen also made important--and until now overlooked--statements about politics.While Veblen's writings seldom mention politics, they are saturated with political ideas: about the relationship among war, executive power, and democracy; about the similarities between modern executive positions and monarchy; about the political influence of corporate power; about the symbolism of politics; and about many other issues. By demonstrating the deep relevance of Veblen's writings to today's political troubles, "The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen "offers an important reconsideration of a major American thinker.
Author: Irving Horowitz
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28
Total Pages: 447
ISBN-13: 1351325140
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThorstein Veblen has a place of honor reserved for truly important figures. Economist, iconoclast, social critic, and moral judge of the American way of life, he has continued to attract the attention of students and scholars alike. People from every spectrum of political thought and every branch of the social sciences have been drawn to his work-sometimes in praise, other times in criticism, but always with a sense of measuring what Veblen said and often how he said it.Veblen was, in the final analysis, an anthropologist of America as an advanced culture, as much a figure of the young twentieth century of America triumphant, as Tocqueville was a figure of the young nineteenth century of America ascending. We share with Veblen a sense of the observer peering at the complex foundation of behavior, whether such behavior is defined in terms of attitudes toward work and leisure, wealth and poverty, and finally, global war and peace.An examination of the contributors to the Veblen literature in this masterful volume serves to make clear just how vital Veblen was and remains to our cultural landscape. Whether the reader selects from or reads all of the statements by David Riesman, Douglas Dowd, Max Lerner, E. Digby Baltzell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and the other outstanding participants in Veblen's Century, the pulsating vitality of Veblen himself is well captured. Indeed, a little bit of Veblen is encapsulated in and by his commentators.Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the home of Veblen, books on him were offered to
Author: Douglas F. Dowd
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published:
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9781412839969
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThorstein Veblen shook the complacency of America in the early twentieth century with his incisive criticisms of our social and economic systems. Discarding the classical view of "eternal" economic laws that conveniently justified the nineteenth-century predatory practices of "big business" in terms of rational self-interest, Veblen cast a fresh, merciless eye on America's money-making passion. In glittering prose, Veblen exposed our social system as one designed to block man's natural "instinct of workmanship." He demonstrated that our leisure-class culture fostered the myth that work was inherently irksome to man. Veblen was also fascinated by the machine and the new science of technology. He saw businessmen basically at war with engineers and scientists because making exorbitant profits did not necessarily jibe with making better goods. In his study of this intriguing personality, Thorstein Veblen, Douglas Dowd reveals that Veblen was unsuccessful in his university career and his two marriages, and in his private life was strange, bitter, and detached. But in his books, Veblen shone as one of America's most penetrating thinkers whose theories proved a potent force in the moderniation of economics as a science. Dowd's sympathetic approach to Veblen's nature and problems places this giant in the field against a contemporary background in powerful and lively fashion. In his new introduction, Michael Keaney breathes new life into this unjustly neglected primer on Veblen. A new generation of students will undoubtedly benefit from this comprehensive guide to the thought of someone whose intellectual endeavor was non-doctrinaire and constantly -changing. Douglas Dowd was professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. He was Guggenheim Fellow. His writings include, Modern Economic Problems in Historical Perspective, America's Role in the World Economy, Step by Step, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal, and numerous articles for scholarly journals and encyclopedias. Michael Keaney is a lecturer in economics at Glasgow Caledonian -University.
Author: John Patrick Diggins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-01-12
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 0691223319
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFired by Stanford and the University of Chicago but recommended by his peers to the presidency of the American Economic Association, Thorstein Veblen remains a baffling figure in American intellectual history. In part because he was an eccentric who shunned publicity, he has also been one of our most neglected. Veblen is known to the general public only as coiner of the term "conspicuous consumption," and to scholars primarily as one of many social critics of the reform-minded Progressive Era. This important critical biography--originally published as The Bard of Savagery and now appearing in paperback for the first time--attempts both to unravel the riddles that surround his reputation and to assess his varied and important contributions to modern social theory.
Author: Oliver Steinert-Lieschied
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Published: 2010-03
Total Pages: 69
ISBN-13: 3640562038
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSeminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,2, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: With his "Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), which is nowadays considered one of his most popular works, Veblen made himself a social outsider because his criticism of society was harsh and provoking. Although he accepted utilitarianism and praised the industrial efficiency of the engineering professions, he rejected what Mills calls the American value of the "heraldry of the greenback" and the "pecuniary fanatism of the business chieftain". Still his work was widely read and many of the problems which he saw in contemporary American society are even nowadays still quite relevant. Dreiser's first successful novel "Sister Carrie" was written in 1900, only one year after Veblen's main work had been published. This fact, as well as the widespread interest in Veblen's theories throughout America may have influenced Dreiser at least indirectly. More important though, is whether there is some textual evidence to prove their agreements and disagreements concerning their critique of society. In contrast to Veblen, Dreiser did not have a solid educational background and was in fact "almost a generation behind the sweep of American intellectual life" (Noble, "Dreiser and Veblen and the Literature of Cultural Change"), so many of his explanations of human hehaviour were made in terms of "chemisms" (Noble 149). Dreiser at times tended to believe Spencer's theories of social-Darwinism and that man was not much more than a "machine" and mainly controlled by physical laws, while Veblen had rather moved beyond such notions (Noble 149). On a deeper level though, Noble considers the supposedly post-Spencerian Veblen to have unconsciously clinged to Spencer's belief in optimistic progressivism, while Dreiser had in fact transcended such notions and raised some doubts about the belief in inevitable and controlled progress in his works (Nobl
Author: Charles F. McGovern
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2009-01-06
Total Pages: 553
ISBN-13: 080787664X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the turn of the twentieth century, an emerging consumer culture in the United States promoted constant spending to meet material needs and develop social identity and self-cultivation. In Sold American, Charles F. McGovern examines the key players active in shaping this cultural evolution: advertisers and consumer advocates. McGovern argues that even though these two professional groups invented radically different models for proper spending, both groups propagated mass consumption as a specifically American social practice and an important element of nationality and citizenship. Advertisers, McGovern shows, used nationalist ideals, icons, and political language to define consumption as the foundation of the pursuit of happiness. Consumer advocates, on the other hand, viewed the market with a republican-inspired skepticism and fought commercial incursions on consumer independence. The result, says McGovern, was a redefinition of the citizen as consumer. The articulation of an "American Way of Life" in the Depression and World War II ratified consumer abundance as the basis of a distinct American culture and history.
