If H. L. Mencken found anything funny in Thorstein Veblen—intentionally funny—he didn’t let on. He was too busy getting laughs at Veblen’s expense, mocking the "gifted headmaster’s prose" for its "grandiose and rococo manner" and its "almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence"—"a cent’s worth of information wrapped in a bale of polysyllables." Mencken’s caricature of the "Prof. Dr.," as he insists on calling Veblen, depends on his seeing nothing in the style or the man but bumbling academic earnestness. "The learned professor," he writes, "gets himself enmeshed in his gnarled sentences like a bull trapped by barbed wire, and his efforts to extricate himself are quite furious and quite as spectacular." He even refuses to see humor in Veblen’s analysis of "the higher learning in America," though the views of the two men on that subject are, as Mencken himself concedes, rather similar.¹

Mencken is something of a rarity. Whatever readers think about Veblen’s economics, there has never been much doubt that the intentions behind The Theory of the Leisure Class were at least in part humorous and ironical. Perceptive comments on the satirical tendencies in his work abound in the literature on Veblen, though except for Alfred Kazin’s extremely cogent analysis of his style, they are generally fragmentary and undeveloped.² As for general readers, the reactions of students at a private college—the one at which the "Prof. Dr." who writes these pages happens to teach—may be taken as fairly representative. For them, reading The Theory of the Leisure Class offers almost instant self-recognition. Acknowledging their ties to the class in question, they are easily persuaded that they lead basically nonproductive, though highly competitive, lives and that their attitudes and habits are survivals, no matter how much they have been transformed as a result of the social evolutionary process, from the culture of their predatory ancestors in late barbarism—particularly that phase of barbarism that climaxed itself in the dark-age forests of northern Europe in the bellicosity of the dolichocephalic (long-headed) blonds or Nordics, forerunners of that ethnic type now vernacularly dubbed WASPs. These students are also intrigued—for theirs is a college for women only—to discover the origin of private property and human possessiveness in the need of primitive hunters and warriors to demonstrate a superior as the Victorian corset seen as an instrument for enforcing conspicuous leisure. They respond to instances of esoteric

diction being used for deliberately ironic purposes, as when Veblen refers to modern Christian denominations as "latter-day anthropomorphic cults"—a phrase which Mencken takes as mere cumbrous jargon.³ They sense something funny in phrases from ordinary language being converted into technical terminology; they also feel the jolt when "conspicuous consumption" modulates into "conspicuous waste." They suspect Veblen of playing a verbal game in the justification he offers for using "waste’ as a technical term."⁴ And they feel the sarcasm in his assertion, "not much is to be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general worthiness and reputability" of the qualities of character which the "collective interest" of modern industrial culture calls for—"honesty, diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking," and a lack of superstitiousness (p. 154).

Unfortunately such irony, however welcome, offers students only scant relief from what they, like Mencken, read primarily as typically boring academic prose. Of this they are tolerant only because of a belief, derived from his being on a course-syllabus, that what Veblen is saying is important. Similarly for most readers, satire in The Leisure Class is apparently incidental. Here and there, however, one encounters critics who see his irony as complicating his statement to the point where serious interpretive issues develop. Perry Miller, for instance, says that "no reader" of Veblen "knows exactly when his leg is being pulled" or can tell whether the proper response is "moral indignation against an improvident society or a Pascalian compliance with folly."⁵ Also suggestive is the famous essay by Joseph Dorfman entitled "The ‘Satire’ of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class," a lengthy demonstration of the extent to which Veblen relied on illustrative material from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology while "completely reversing Spencer’s position" on social evolution.⁶

Dorfman finds in Spencer the source of the distinction between what Veblen calls industry and exploit or, to use Dorfman’s words, "between the ‘militant’ and industrial types of behavior," a distinction fundamental to the theories of both men. In Spencer’s melioristic vision of social evolution in Hobbesian militancy, essential to the "struggle for existence," is the primal human attitude; a more peaceful industrious human character or temperament emerges only very slowly with the complex institutions of private property and contract. Veblen, however, partly on hints from Spencer himself, posits an initial savage stage of nature which is "peaceable" and workmanlike, followed later by predatory barbarism, the evolutionary stage at which ownership begins. So for Veblen, modern pecuniary culture, no matter how civilized it considers itself, is fundamentally militant or barbaric.⁷

It is not clear whether this reversal of Spencer’s categories is the "satire" to which Dorfman’s title refers. On the whole the article ignores the question of satire after noting at the beginning that The Leisure Class "has customarily been viewed as a satire upon the mannerisms of the upper class." For Dorfman, this view misses the point. He maintains that the book is a "drastic" or "ruthless dissection" of "business enterprise" and the whole "modern economic order." Whether, for Dorfman, Veblen is satirizing what he dissects is not clear. A reference to "Veblen’s intentions, satirical or otherwise," together with the quotation marks around the word "satire" in his title may indicate that Dorfman is not sure whether The Leisure Class is in any sense satirical, let alone whether it satirizes Spencer, the upper classes, or business, or all together.⁸

Yet Dorfman makes the rather remarkable assertion that "Veblen with superb effrontery set up a predatory barbarian stage to follow the peaceable savage."⁹ Does this mean that Veblen, consciously or not, was more intent on turning social evolutionary concepts against orthodox social Darwinism and classical economics than in getting at anthropological truth? It is difficult to decide what Dorfman thinks. But if the views of Veblen and Spencer are mirror images of each other, it is not the only instance of such symmetry in opposing academic theories. How often have we heard statements such as that Marx stood Hegel on his head? At a high enough level of abstraction, conflicting historical or cultural theories are apt to expose each other as somewhat contrived or fabricated and expose theorizing itself as a sort of game-playing. Louis Hartz and the "consensus" historians, for instance, face off against the "progressive" historiography of Becker and Beard over the issue of whether a fundamental middle-of-the-road tendency in politics or a recurrent radical-conservative opposition has dominated American history. There being plenty of what can be taken as evidence on both sides, argumentative strategy is reduced to maintaining that what looks like consensus is really conflict—or vice versa—which is to say that one dominates and the other is subordinate—or vice versa. An almost identical controversy persists in regard to the American South. Did the southern mind or culture, as W. J. Cash argued in 1941, remain essentially unchanged throughout its history, or did the postwar South at some point become, as it liked to think of itself, genuinely "New"? Exposed to such debates, one may become more receptive to Hayden White’s conception of history as fictional, dramatic, and figurative, the imposition of patterns of order—modes of plot, argument, and style— on essentially amorphous materials.¹⁰

Anthropology in Veblen’s day, particularly as it pondered the

evolution of early human societies, was a field in which the hypothesizing imagination had a good deal of free range. Unearthing and piecing together archaeological evidence was a slow process. And the cataloguing of information about surviving non-literate cultures by ethnologists by no means fully illuminated human prehistory. Clearly, people in early cultures were at one time or another hunters (of small and big game), gatherers, fishermen, warriors, horticulturalists, herders, and farmers. But in what order did the various activities or technologies develop? And if there was an order, was it the same among all prehistoric peoples throughout the world—which would argue the "psychic unity" of the human species? Or did the diffusion of culture, the influence of one human group on others, mean that the sequence of development was different in different societies and different locations? Another issue was the degree of differentiation between male and female social roles and the power and prestige attached to various occupations and activities. It was not until well after 1900 that anthropologists began to approach consensus on such questions—nor is there total agreement even today. Meanwhile, especially up to 1900, it was open season for theorizing.¹¹

Veblen himself viewed scientific interpretation or hypothesizing as a species of myth-making, the product ultimately of "idle curiosity," a universal faculty or instinct, as much operative in modern philosophy as in primitive totemism. Virtually all interpretive thought has an element of fantasy in it, he maintained. Furthermore human beings find it next to impossible not to attribute a purposiveness such as they feel in themselves to the surrounding world or the non-human parts of it which confront them. Teleologizing their small or infinite universes, they in effect animate them. "The bond of combination in the making of systems, whether cosmologic, mythic, philosophic or scientific," according to Veblen, "has been some putative human trait or traits." American Indians have been adept at "interpretation in terms of fertility, growth, nurture, and life-cycles." In the "more elaborate myth-making" of the western mind in the modern age an image of God as the "Great Artificer" has emerged.

Veblen made these observations in The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914).¹² Eight years earlier in his well-known essay "The Place of Science in the Modern World" he had characterized the "‘interpretation’ of facts under the guidance of idle curiosity" as consistently taking a "dramatic form."¹³ Both of these works post-date The Leisure Class (1899). But if the concept of theorizing as fabrication or fabulation under the aegis of idle curiosity was not to be fully formulated for another few years, it had already been

adumbrated in "The Preconceptions of Economic Science," a three-part essay published in 1899-1900. Here Veblen refers to Spencer’s "uncritical" meliorism as the essential shaper of his sociological theory. But Spencer is not being singled out as particularly unscientific. Rather the suggestion is that he is doing what any theorist has to do. The "ultimate ground of knowledge," Veblen says, "is always . . . something in the way of a preconception, accepted uncritically, but applied in criticism and demonstration of all else with which the science is concerned."¹⁴

Though Veblen was persistent in exposing the covert biases of other social theorists, it is clear that he did not consider himself exempt from such uncritical preconceptions. He was willing, however, to put on the mask of extreme scientific detachment and objectivity. It was a useful fiction. He seemed thereby to comply with academic "canons of reputability" (p. 257), and he was able to forestall hostile reactions that would have been inevitable had he openly proclaimed his personal values in 1900. Yet those values are there to be seen through the mask for those who care to look. For those who see the extent to which values shape the theory, The Leisure Class may be more profitably read as satiric fiction than as social science.

The text takes shape around a half-buried metaphor not unlike the one that Matthew Josephson was to make explicit a few years later in his title The Robber Barons or that which Dan Beard had already made visible in one of his illustrations for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by attaching Jay Gould’s head and face to the body of a sixth-century slave-driver. We must imagine Veblen in the 1890s, acutely aware of the economic distress and conflict being generated by America’s rapid industrialization, living through the era of populist agitation, the panic of 1893 and the Bryan-McKinley campaign of 1896. We know that as a socialist, he had been greatly stirred by Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887, published in 1888, with its memorable image of the American economy as a coach being laboriously dragged over a rough road by the working class, who are harnessed to it like horses and mules. A significant implication in that metaphor is that the upper classes do not contribute to the progress of the coach. In Veblen’s terms, they do not "work." Contrary to popular wisdom, businessmen, according to Bellamy and Veblen, are not chiefly responsible for making the economy go. They are passengers, part of the leisure class, getting a free ride. They "never get down, even at the steepest ascents," though they are sometimes forced to hold tight because of the swaying of the coach. Now and then a few are even thrown off into the mire. Most of the time, however, the "seats on top were very breezy and comfortable.

Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team."¹⁵

It also seems safe to assume that an avid reader like Veblen knew A Connecticut Yankee, though his having done so is not crucial to the theory being developed here. In Mark Twain’s time-warp fantasy published the year after Bellamy’s, the conflation of the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages anticipates the first sentence of The Leisure Class, in which feudalism is classified as barbarism. The Knights of the Round Table, as Hank Morgan depicts them, ludicrously prefigure the barbarian hunters and warriors who in Veblen evolve into the leisure class: their military prowess serves no useful social purpose; they dress ostentatiously, eat and drink to excess, and boast extravagantly of the knights and dragons they have slain and captives they have taken; they parade their prisoners in the banquet hall as a way of enhancing prestige and status. Morgan says explicitly that the knights do not "work," and he makes clear the connection between chivalric exploits and the aristocracy’s exploitation of the drudging masses. Before Twain’s travesty of Malory is finished, it begins to suggest parallels between sixth-century and nineteenth-century class conflicts. And these suggestions are greatly magnified by Beard’s illustrations, one of which is entitled "evolution." It shows a pelican-like bird with a rapacious beak transformed through several stages into a paunchy, bearded Victorian gent, with a diamond stud in his shirt; he stands unmoved before a beggar, who, we see, is himself the evolutionary descendant of a dog that has been trained to sit up and beg.¹⁶ This cartoon, an improvisation inspired by Hank Morgan’s tirade against the protective tariff, not only plays with the concept of social evolution but also suggests the fiercely satirical depiction of dogs in The Leisure Class, where "man’s best friend" is seen rather as "man’s servant," an animal with the "gift" of "fawning" servility, which affords "play to our propensity for mastery." At the same time, Veblen contends, the dog is "associated in our imagination with the chase—a meritorious employment"—not a form of work—"and an expression of the honorable predatory impulse" (p. 103).

Veblen converts the stock image from political rhetoric, the capitalist as feudal freebooter, into a scientific theory by arguing that predatory tendencies are so rooted in human habit and human genes that there is an unbroken cultural and hereditary connection between barbarian pugnacity and modern pecuniary behavior. But Veblen’s theory is not only "dramatic"; he tacitly concedes that major segments of it may actually be little more than fiction. In his Preface, while noting that he made a "more explicit statement" of the book’s "theoretical position" in

three articles recently published in The American Journal of Sociology, he actually casts doubt on their significance with the strange and not easily decipherable observation that the book’s "argument does not rest on these—in part novel—generalizations in such a way that it would altogether lose its possible value as a detail of economic theory in case these novel generalizations should, in the reader’s apprehension, fall away through being insufficiently backed by authority or data" (p. xx).

Indeed the generalizations are novel, and Veblen does not offer adequate authority or data for them, in either the Journal of Sociology articles or the book itself.¹⁷ One of the first reviewers of The Leisure Class said that Veblen "takes his data largely from the disputable facts of primitive society without even sufficient evidence that he has made good use of the best material so far as it goes, and he then assumes that having explained the origin of an institution he has explained its underlying motives and tendencies as it exists in modern society." Another reviewer complained of Veblen’s "somewhat mystical interpretation of historical phenomena."¹⁸ And modern anthropology has by and large remained unimpressed by Veblen’s view that big-game hunting and warfare could not have evolved until humans first went through a long, largely sedentary, peaceful and communitarian stage of development and learned to produce an economic surplus.¹⁹ His theory of cultural evolution appears to be—he offers few citations—an ingenious and highly original improvisation based on the "instinct" psychology of Jacques Loeb, his colleague at the University of Chicago, coupled with suggestions from the work of such early figures in anthropology as J. J. Bachofen, A. W. Buckland, H. L. Roth, Lewis H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor, and Eduard Hahn. He largely assumes that as a consequence of human "psychic unity," people all over the world have gone through a "parallel" sequence of development. But this conception was under a constantly increasing challenge from the diffusionists at the time Veblen was working out his theory. Robert Lowie’s The History of Ethnological Theory makes it clear that anyone as well read as Veblen was in American and European social science in the 1890s could not have been unaware of that challenge.²⁰ And Veblen himself from time to time acknowledges the paucity of evidence to support this theory (pp. 23–24, 32–33, for instance).

Yet his "superb effrontery" enables him to confound the categories of primitive and civilized behavior, so that readers find customs and institutions that they take for granted being viewed as though by an anthropologist on a field trip, trying to comprehend rituals that seem totally irrational. The superficially matter-of-fact, morally neutral style of the book, with its heavy reliance on passive constructions, suggestive

of laboratory-report prose, increases this effect. Veblen begins disorienting readers with his first sentence: "The institution of the leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan" (p. 21). There is a double shock here, first a major one in the referral of something as modern as the leisure class back to a barbarian state, then a lesser one in the classification of feudal culture as barbarian.²¹

And the surprises continue. Under high barbarism the leisure class work at war and politics, in the priesthood—also at sports. But then again they don’t work—by definition: their "employments" are "non-industrial." This is part of Veblen’s elaborate way of saying that the leisure class do not contribute to the "everyday work of getting a livelihood." Getting a livelihood, it turns out, is what was women’s responsibility in the system which evolved at a lower barbarian stage. What women did was "industrial"—hence "labor" or "work." Though lower barbarian male hunters also contributed to the food supply, their employment was not industrial or "productive," because they did not see it as such. For them it was "exploit" and was therefore "honorific" and not real work.²²

Veblen’s penchant for irony, satire, and parody was deep—seated. He was an inveterate (and sometimes cruel) practical joker. As an undergraduate at Carleton college he upset some of the zealous Congregationalists with mock-lectures entitled "Plea for Cannibalism" and "Apology for Topers."²³ Not surprisingly, there is mild parody in his early article "The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress," a preliminary version of chapter seven of The Leisure Class. Although he published the piece in Popular Science Monthly instead of an academic journal, he did not use the light touch that such a topic seems to call for. Instead he resorted to a deadpan academic earnestness which by its implicit inappropriateness becomes a playful mocking of pedantry. It is in this context, in the last sentence of the article, that we first encounter the term "conspicuous consumption," with its slightly jingling oddness.²⁴

In The Leisure Class, because of its central irony (civilization equals barbarism) and the inability or unwillingness of the academic language to acknowledge the irony openly, satire and parody seem to lurk everywhere. The book consistently overstates its points, although in a peculiarly matter-of-fact, seemingly disinterested way. The omission of conventional documentation contributes to the effect. And in relying on the "homely facts" of "everyday experience" to illustrate conceptions such as pecuniary emulation and conspicuous consumption, Veblen gives himself a license to exaggerate and invent (p. xx). Although he does qualify statements from time to time, the heavy jargon in which he

states his main propositions seems to obliterate qualifications like a steam-roller. There is little that is tentative about The Leisure Class. The theory develops with some of the stark simplicity of myth. The hero is a savage of some nobility.²⁵ There is a fall from a primitive, peaceful state brought about by food surpluses which afford leisure for hunting and warfare. Men begin to swagger and look down on women, who now comprise the first distinct working class, then begin to take them captives in war, bringing them home proudly as trophies valued as much, if not more, for the status they confer on their owners as for their industrial usefulness. Women are thus the first items conspicuously consumed, and something like the barbarian male’s pride in having more (or more prestigious) women than his neighbor has remained the basic motive behind ownership ever since.

Much of Veblen’s writing is far less satirical than The Leisure Class. His articles in The American Journal of Sociology, though they propose bold hypotheses, are more cautious and conventionally academic.²⁶ Their arguments against established positions are more deliberately developed. The Instinct of Workmanship, fifteen years later, sometimes viewed as Veblen’s most important book, is a substantial reworking of his theory of cultural evolution, painstakingly argued and backed by an abundance of empirical evidence.²⁷ The "Rousseauistic strain" persists.²⁸ But he now modifies major portions of his over-all scheme or so severely qualifies them as to leave the theory relatively flat and undramatic. The change from peaceful (more or less matriarchal) savagery to militant patriarchal barbarism is now seen as much more gradual. Ownership and warfare both exist to a degree before there is an economic surplus—at least in some societies. Slavery, with the stress on usefulness rather than status-value, is seen as the major step in the large-scale institutionalization of property. The taking of women as trophies is not singled out for special attention. Hunting as a factor in the development of distinction between exploit and industry is ignored.²⁹

If one tries to take The Leisure Class as, on the whole, sober scholarship and theory, it falls suspect and begins to decompose in the mist of hyperbole; it becomes, as Bernard Rosenberg says, the work of a "quasi-scientific satirist."³⁰ Let the suspicion grow, however, that Veblen does not exactly or literally mean what he says—a suspicion that inevitably overtakes most readers somewhere in the book—and it holds together, making perfect sense as the slightly outlandish speculations of an academic misfit—Veblen making a "character" out of himself, not so much an absent-minded professor as one whose sense of reality simply doesn’t square with what everyone else takes for granted and who sometimes seems to get lost in verbiage as he tries to explain himself.

A note of caution, however. To characterize The Leisure Class as satiric fiction disguised as social theory is not to turn Veblen into a bogus scholar or intellectual—only into a more imaginative one. The fiction is obviously not without its truth. He may overstate or partially invent the hidden meanings of the various attitudes, rituals, and symbols that constitute pecuniary culture, but his satire has provoked a good many readers in that culture to take a more realistic look at its basic assumptions and values. In addition, the book is, as Dorfman maintains, a "ruthless dissection"—if somewhat slanted—of "business enterprise." And it offers a far more sophisticated conception of the process of social or institutional adaptation than social Darwinism had previously achieved, Veblen’s key perception being that the environment human beings are forced to interact with is chiefly social rather than physical or geographic.³¹

As a work of fiction The Leisure Class may, with appropriate pedantry, be termed mock-monographic in form. It has some affinity with the mad-projector or modest-proposal satire of the eighteenth century, though its irony is on the whole more covert. The theory that Veblen-the-persona advances is only an exaggerated version of the theory that Veblen-the-author would like to believe in, whereas in the irony of works like Franklin’s "An Edict of the King of Prussia" and "The Sale of the Hessians," the proposal offered, though given under the seal of high authority, is patently absurd, Veblen’s slightly disoriented professor is more akin in one sense to Irving’s master of obfuscation, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who even when right—and he is blatantly wrong-headed much of the time—is apt to sound confused.

At the same time we may take as a model for interpreting The Leisure Class the American tall tale told with a straight face—and often in a long-winded way. The dialect is academic, but the basic values are those of the Norwegian-American country boy that Veblen in part always remained: common sense,³² respect for homely utilitarian plainness and honest workmanship, together with hatred of the predatory Yankee—not necessarily the proverbial peddler but the small-town businessman or lawyer of Wisconsin or Minnesota with whom his father had had to deal, or the Wall Street banker or broker who served as the midwestern farmer’s traditional scapegoat.³³ Hiding behind academic awkwardness, like a squatter exaggerating his uncouthness, Veblen mocks the greatest dandy of them all, the Gilded Age conspicuous consumer. That there is also something like Yankee cunning or cuteness in this strategy serves to remind us of the complexities of American humor. Rural Yankees on the deadpan, taciturn, noncommittal side, their seeming disinterestedness baffling and infuriating the tourist or city-slicker, are country cousins of the backwoodsman.

Veblen’s basic style is low-keyed but persistent academic jargon. It does not rely heavily on esoteric terminology such as he himself parodied in the following passage, mixing together language from biology and economics:

If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogrammic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn . . . ?

Bookish-sounding polysyllabics are plentiful in Veblen’s prose, but they do not constitute a conventional technical vocabulary. He refers to the language of the book as "everyday speech" (p. 177)—surely another exaggeration, but not as much a one as we might at first think. While short simple sentences and monosyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives are never abundant in Veblen, he can go for fairly long stretches without using words that are in the least recondite. It is the highly abstract nature of his argument, his logical precision (except when he uses—intentionally—"foggy language"³⁵), and his surface impersonality that are primarily responsible for the colorless, hence "scientific," manner. Yet integral to the style are his numerous, quite original, slightly provoking, oddly rhythmic, virtually untechnical technical terms. Stamped with his sly personality, phrases like "pecuniary emulation," "conspicuous leisure," "vicarious leisure," "conspicuous consumption," "devout consumption" make one aware that the author (or persona), however conventional in may respects, is no ordinary academic. The more one looks into his language, the more one senses that it is drab and labored only to the extent that Veblen wants it to be. In reality his style is an assortment of several styles. He has a fondness for verbal embellishment, for instance, for elegant variation and circumlocution, which curiously aligns him with the leisure class. And that characteristic shades off into a verbal whimsy or dandyism which lends satiric overtones to terms such as "ceremonial consumer" (p. 69) and "physiognomy of astuteness" (p. 182). The word-play becomes roughly poetic in "The exercise of the emulative and lower animistic proclivities" (p. 196). But at the same time Veblen is not above using very blunt terms which violate his avowed neutrality. His transformations of "work" into "drudgery" and

"conspicuous consumption" into "conspicuous waste" are not, as we shall see, isolated examples of this tendency.

The full scope of Veblen’s fiction reveals itself only gradually. As the theory proceeds into the "quasi-peaceable stage of industry" (p. 58), that is, high barbarism, examples of leisure-class behavior become somewhat ludicrous. In advanced forms of conspicuously vicarious leisure, for instance, men replace women as servants of the sort who must be visible

to guests or the public. "Men, especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen . . . are obviously better suited for this work, as showing a larger waste of time and human energy." Ever more emphatically he insists on the paradox that in many cases work is leisure. The professor plays a wily semantic game. "The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under the head of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery. . . ." But is it correct to call it that? Sardonically Veblen says that the drudgery might aptly be "designated as wasted effort." But then again "vicarious leisure" is the correct term, because, as he points out with exaggerated meticulousness, it is on behalf of the "pecuniary reputability" of "the master" or "the household" that "a given amount of time and effort is conspicuously wasted" (pp. 54–55).

In the modern period, because of the industrial and scientific revolutions, work becomes reputable again for the bourgeois male, though Veblen will eventually classify businessmen’s work in his own way as exploitive and thus more technically a form of leisure. Meanwhile it is the useless spending sprees of the businessman’s wife, the ceremonial consumer, that have become the primary form of vicarious leisure. It is at this point, after having used the word "waste" over and over again, that Veblen at last comments on it. He uses it, he says, "for want of a better term" and does not mean it in "an odious sense." Spending money on something you don’t need is "no less legitimate than any other expenditure"—from the viewpoint of the "individual consumer." Such expenditure "is here called ‘waste’ because it does not serve human life or well-being on the whole." Economically damaging to society, conspicuous consumption is waste, but no culpability attaches to the conspicuous consumer. She can’t help it. Pecuniary emulation is her heritage. She has grown to need what she originally didn’t need. She would feel deprived without it. For her it is no waste. Yet, Veblen says, he uses the term with full awareness that "waste’ in the language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is characterized as wasteful" (pp. 78–79). Thus the learned professor manages both to assert and deny that he uses the word neutrally.³⁶

Humorous examples of status-seeking through lavish displays of wealth extend Veblen’s comic myth by grossly oversimplifying human motivation. "For the aesthetic purpose," he says, "the lawn is a cow pasture." What people unconsciously want is to have a pre-predatory pastoral "idyll ... rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow into the lawn." But a post-predatory psychology blocks this desire, he explains in deadpan academese, except "where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances"—i. e., the mansion, stables, kennels, servants, etc.—

"bars out any imputation of thrift," and only then with an "expensive breed of cow" (p. 99). Mencken, making fun of Veblen, suggests that a dislike of cow-flops is the real reason, and he may well be right. But he is missing Veblen’s humor.³⁷

In the same vein Veblen has conspicuous consumers, under "pecuniary canons of taste," cut down forests of sturdy trees and replace them with softer and more brittle ones because they are more expensive (p. 102). Such satire reaches a small climax in his previously mentioned attack on the dog, that "filthiest" and "nastiest" of animals. The "grotesque deformity" of the more pedigreed of these pets renders them economically "useless," though not of course to their owners. For them dogs serve as status symbols. For Veblen the "canine monstrosities" provide a perfect mirror of the dominant characteristics of pecuniary culture (p. 103). The second half of the book deals chiefly with the conflict in our own day between savage and barbarian tendencies as they survive in Western society. Science and industrialization have brought us to the point where human interests will best be served by peaceful, co-operative, productive habits and attitudes, a regime of no-nonsense workmanship. But the dominant classes in society are those in whom the barbarian tendencies prevail. Business threatens to subvert industry. Unfortunately all classes are so blinded by pecuniary values that they cannot recognize their true interests.

It is a situation almost straight out of classical satire. What passes for clear-sightedness, "the point of view of life under modern civilized conditions in an enlightened community of the Western culture,"³⁸ has no use for the "ante-predatory savage" traits. And Veblen, playing the detached scholar to the hilt, concedes that the savage "was no great success." His character was marked by "weakness, inefficiency, lack of initiative and ingenuity, and a yielding and indolent amiability, together with a lively but inconsequential animistic sense" (pp. 151–52). The use of "inconsequential" here is not inconsequential, though it sounds harmless enough. Harmlessness is the real point, as we come to see later in chapters 11 and 12. Savage animism, tied to attitudes which are more or less matriarchal and agrarian, helps preserve the peace. Barbarian and modern anthropomorphism, however, reflects and reinforces the patriarchal belligerence that is to be found, for instance, in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (p. 199). Efficiency and initiative are also of course less important to savage life, which, according to Veblen’s fable, is not dedicated to "great success." But with what may be called savage sarcasm, he says that only those "not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling" can ignore the "economic failings" of savagism. And its "economic virtues"? He does mention them, but only as though to do so

were an after-thought—an understated one at that (they "have some value for the collective life"): they are only "truthfulness, peaceableness, good-will, and non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and things" (p. 152, emphasis added).

Contrary to his constant reaffirmation of his objectivity, Veblen’s language becomes increasingly abusive of the leisure class as he continues. Having listed the chief savage traits, he goes on matter-of-factly to contrast them with those that make for the best adaptation to, and chances of survival in, pecuniary culture: "ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and disingenuousness—a free resort to force and fraud." Further on he adds "sharp practice," "shrewd trading and unscrupulous management." This abuse stops just short of becoming outright invective in the chapter called "Modern Survivals of Prowess," in which leisure class males, in their aptitude for "force and fraud" in warfare, sports and business, are consistently compared to "lower-class delinquents." The underlying metaphor of the book at last becomes fully explicit. The leisure class male, as his use of the walking stick indicates, is an out-and-out barbarian: that implement "serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer’s hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort. . . . But it is also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity" (pp. 152, 154, 181, 176).

Veblen’s fiction has almost reached its limit. He does not go on to predict a cataclysmic struggle between savage and barbarian propensities, let alone foresee pecuniary pugnacity blowing the world to bits in the twentieth century. In his penultimate chapter, he pays due attention to modern "Survivals of Non-Invidious Interest,"—traits that serve the "collective well-being." Still the barbarian with the walking stick remains an ominous figure. And having analyzed leisure class institutions about as extensively as one could expect, the befuddled professor who must be presumed to have written the book comes at last to "The Higher Learning as an Expression of Pecuniary Culture." It is his own milieu. Veblen sees, even if his persona doesn’t, that as a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, he has become a partial collaborator with the leisure class or its modern variant, the business community. As a scholar, he performs "vicarious leisure" for his employees, the university trustees. They gain a "certain repute," an enhancement of status, for sponsoring activity so conspicuously wasteful (p. 246).

"Learning set out" in the Middle Ages, Veblen says, "by being in some sense a by-product of the priestly leisure class." This makes it, according

to his wit, a "scholastic discipline" (pp. 237, 235). Except as science has found its way into the sacred halls of academe, higher education is for Veblen an irrelevant, archaic endeavor, devoted basically to filling young leisure class minds with an esoteric knowledge that will satisfy conservative "canons of reputability." One essential academic acquisition of course is "elegant" or "classic" English, the "facile use" of which, says Veblen, "lends dignity to even the most common-place and trivial string of talk." "The newest form of English diction is . . . never written," at least in reputable circles. It is too close to reality. In an outburst of unadorned, unwavering self-assertion the author tells us, "it is notorious that the ideas of today are effectively expressed in the slang of today" (pp. 256–57).

Immediately, however, he retreats back into the protective shell of the language he is ridiculing. "Classic speech," he says in the somewhat anti-climatic passage which concludes the book, "has the honorific virtue of dignity; it commands attention . . . because it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and therefore argue a waste of time and exemption from the use and need of direct and forcible speech" (pp. 257–78). Yet with these slightly cumbrous (though clever) sentences Veblen ironically clarifies the significance of his bizarre style. In a pecuniary culture nearly everyone is compromised, torn between the lure of a status-conferring wealth and a longing for self-acceptance. The Theory of the Leisure Class, in exposing the contradictions of pecuniary culture, comes linguistically to embody those contradictions. That is to say that in Veblen’s fiction the professor is caught in his own theory; his book, we are finally forced to see, is an item partially intended for the emporia where conspicuous consumers shop.

¹H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, First Series (New York: Knopf, 1923), pp. 66, 69, 70, 81–82.
²Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), pp. 135–41. On early recognition of satire in The Leisure Class, see Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking, 1935), pp. 196–97.
³Mencken, pp. 67–69.
⁴Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 78. Hereafter, except in special circumstances, this work is cited by page number in the text.
⁵Perry Miller, ed. American Thought: Civil War to World War I (New York: Rinehart, 1954), pp. xlvii–xlviii.

⁶Dorfman, ‘The ‘Satire’ of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class," Political Science Quarterly, 47 (1932), 409.
⁷Dorfman, pp. 364, 368.
⁸Dorfman, pp. 363, 409. Emphasis added.
⁹Dorfman, 370.
¹⁰Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1973), Introduction, pp. 1–42.
¹¹See Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (New York: Rinehart, 1937), esp. chs. 7–9.
¹²(New York: Macmillan), pp. 73, 59–60.
¹³The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), p. 7.
¹⁴lbid., pp. 150 (n. 2), 149. In The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal(Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956) Bernard Rosenberg suggests that Veblen was more or less aware that the scientific method sometimes involves the use of "fictional constructs" (p. 33).
¹⁵Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966 [1888]), pp. 7-8.
¹⁶Samuel Langhorne Clemens, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: A Facsimile of the First Edition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1963 [1890]), pp. xxiv, 37–49, 420–28, 465.
¹⁷lt is interesting that William Dean Howells in an article that brought The Leisure Class to the attention of the general public reacted to the book by calling the behavior of the American leisure class "the most dramatic social fact of our time" and potentially "the material" of the "great American novel"; in "An Opportunity for Fiction, Literature, n.s. [IV] (April 29, 1899), 362.
¹⁸Samuel McCune Lindsay, "The Economic Principle Underlying Human Institutions," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 15 (March, 1900), 283; John Cummings, ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class," Journal of Political Economy, 7 (Sept., 1899), 426.
¹⁹See, for instance, E. Adamson Hoebel, Anthropology: The Study of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), chs. 6, 10, 11, 15.
²⁰Lowie, pp. 54–56, 82–84, 92, 113–115, chs. 7–9, passim.
²¹Veblen directly clashes here with the influential classification scheme of Lewis H. Morgan, who marked civilization as emerging from barbarism with the invention of writing in phonetic alphabet; in Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1878), pp. 11–13.
²²The Leisure Class, ch. I, passim.
²³Dorfman, Veblen and His America, pp. 31–32, 499.
²⁴Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (New York: Viking, 1934), p. 77.
²⁵See Rosenberg, pp. 47–50.
²⁶The articles are "The Beginnings of Ownership," "The Barbarian Status of women," and "The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor," all from vol. 4(1898–99) and reprinted in Essays in Our Changing Order.
²⁷See Max Lerner, ed., The Portable Veblen (New York: Viking, 1948), pp. 7–8; John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 65.
²⁸Rosenberg, p. 50.
²⁹The Instinct of Workmanship, chs. 2, 3, and particularly 4.
³⁰Rosenberg, p. 8.
³¹See The Leisure Class, pp. 131–135; also Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas(New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1958), pp. 299–300. As for Veblen’s motives in offering such a book to the public, they must have been complicated, to say the least. Scholars stress his eccentric, contradictory character, at once reckless and cautious. He must have known his "theory" was bound to provoke hostile reactions and might bring him notoriety. He may have felt academic pressure to publish: President Harper of the University of Chicago thought Veblen did not sufficiently "advertise" the institution—see Dorfman, Veblen and His America, p. 174. Having decided to publish, did he strip the

argument almost bare of supporting evidence for fear that the evidence then available would make the theory seem more dubious? Did he assume that if challenged to supply evidence, he could ultimately produce it—as he tried to do in The Instinct of Workmanship?
³²A term Veblen constantly used, sometimes in a deprecatory way, as when commonsense attitudes seem mere prejudices or superstitions, but often with fundamental respect.
³³The Veblens brought to America a memory of having been cheated out of their land in Norway by sharp practice (Dorfman, Veblen and His America, p. 3.
³⁴Veblen, The Place of Science, p. 70.
³⁵Dorfman, Veblen and His America, p. 174.
³⁶The deviousness of this passage shows Veblen’s deftness at using explanation as parody of pedantry or as mystification, hiding his true position—if he had one—from all but the most persistent analysis. Miller (p. xlvii) speaks of his "deliberate clumsiness," concealing "a deadly satirical purpose."
³⁷Mencken, p. 77.
³⁸That good eighteenth-century term "enlightenment" is the signal that irony is coming.