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Economist in Time: The Life and Work of Thorstein Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics
Author(s): Charles Camic (Author)
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publication Date: 29 Jan. 2021
- Language: English
- Print length: 448 pages
- ISBN-10: 0674659724
- ISBN-13: 9780674659728
Book Description
A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans-a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”-to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
This is a book of profound scholarship produced by a talented sociologist at the height of his intellectual power. Going beyond strict intellectual history to focus on theory, Camic analyzes how Veblen developed a ‘repertoire of knowledge-making practices’ central to his seminal ideas in the first decades of his life as a researcher. The author also locates the concept of conspicuous consumption in Veblen’s broader contribution to the study of nonproductive economic activities. This brilliant book is certainly the definitive contribution to our understanding of Veblen and the context that made his pathbreaking approach possible. –Michèle Lamont, past president of the American Sociological Association
Veblen changes our perception of a major figure in American social science, showing that he stood at the heart of the emerging economics discipline. Given the enormous literature on Veblen, by historians, sociologists and economists, that is a remarkable achievement. –Roger Backhouse, University of Birmingham and Erasmus University Rotterdam
Camic’s
Veblen weaves together narrative, analytic interpretation, and social theory to create a compelling, engaging, and revolutionary account that tells us something new about a familiar and fascinating figure while conveying a powerful sense of melancholy. There is really nothing quite like it. –George Steinmetz, University of MichiganAbout the Author
Charles Camic is Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Sociology and a member of the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University. An expert on the sociology of knowledge, he is coeditor of Social Knowledge in the Making.
