Conspicuous Radicalism

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN (632 pp.)--Edited by Max Lerner--Viking ($2).

Yesterday's harried "freethinkers" produced a flood of radical literature, most of which is now as dull and dead as the social grievances it attacked. Of the countless contributors to this literature, Thorstein Veblen is one of the very few who does not give the impression of being just a cut off the old red jelly.

One reason why Veblen survives is that he was as skeptical of his friends as he was of his enemies. He distrusted both Marxism and capitalism, bankers and proletariat. In addition, he expressed his skepticism in a rough-hewn prose style which made him the most impressive American satirist of his day.

No Speak English. Born in Wisconsin (1857), of Norwegian farm parents, Veblen was fluent in Norwegian, German, Greek and Latin when he entered college --but knew scarcely any English. Learning it from academic texts, he emerged with a prose which today seems like a humorous man's academic parody of academic writing.

Veblen approached social criticism as if he were some expert envoy-extraordinary sent from a distant planet to report on human behavior. Under this bland mask of anthropological detachment he hid his passionate conviction that man, in being forced to labor in the sweat of his brow, was not paying a divine penalty for sin but simply giving vent to his most powerful natural passion : "the instinct of workmanship."

Veblen believed that modern machinery was the latest expression of this natural instinct; he concluded that refusal to use the maximum machinery was not only economically silly but downright unnatural. The machine's chief enemy, he argued, was a moss-backed array of old-fashioned institutions and traditions -- and he set out to blow them apart. In his first and most fascinating book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he coldly scrutinized the various ways in which the successful businessman struggled to evade his debt to the very machine which had made him rich.

Fetch Me My Handmaiden. Far from being proud of his business connections, said Veblen, the tycoon does his best to convince people that he has never handled a deal in his life. He buys an impractical top hat, to symbolize his state of "conspicuous leisure." He goes off on a jag of "conspicuous consumption"--i.e., he pours his machine-made money into old china and silverware whose chief virtue is that they are handmade and therefore obviously very expensive. To show that he can afford to be "conspicuously wasteful," he turns a stretch of productive pasture into a non-productive park, boots out the "useful" cow that grazes there and replaces it with a herd of useless deer.

Veblen was mocking a process as old as civilization, and it was not necessary to be a radical in order to enjoy his satire. When his book appeared, he was mortified to find that it delighted many of the "leisure class"--the only class, perhaps, which could fully appreciate the conspicuous haughtiness of Veblen's leisurely, elaborate prose. It became Veblen's fate to fall between two stools--between those who thought he was just funny and those who thought he was plain dangerous.

Let's Not Be Cryptogamic. College presidents were not amused when Veblen described them (in The Higher Learning in America) as "Captains of Erudition" whose function was to accustom the sons of rough "Captains of Industry" to "genteel solemnities" and urbane forms of "dissipation." Earnest economists who had written cumbersome tomes of unintelligible prose positively hated Veblen when he leaned forward, assumed a poker face and gravely asked them: "If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn . . .?"

"While the road of social criticism must always be lonely," pontificates glib Pundit Max Lerner in the introduction, "it need not be made bitter as Dante's exile." But Veblen--who was as different from Dante as Bernard Shaw is from Pope Pius--was not an easy man to employ or encourage. His conspicuous love of lechery caused him to be fired first from the University of Chicago, then from Leland Stanford. Hired as an economist by the U.S. Food Administration in World War I, he coolly proposed, says Lerner, "to do away with the merchants in the country towns and get supplies to farmers by a centralized governmental mail-order system."

Veblen Girls. In the '20s Veblen, for all his misfortunes, became the hero of the sort of cult he most disliked. "Veblenism," mocked H. L. Mencken in Smart Set, "was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world. There were even, in Chicago, Veblen Girls--perhaps Gibson Girls grown middle-aged and despairing." But Veblen himself had had enough of public life. Nominated for the presidency of the American Economic Association, he coldly rejected it, remarking: "They didn't offer it to me when I needed it." He withdrew to a mountain cabin in California, and in 1929 the dead ashes of his once lively body were scattered in the Pacific.

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