The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (phonics readers TXT) 📕
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1899 was the tail end of the Gilded Age, a time in America of rapid economic expansion that caused a select few to become ultra-wealthy, while millions of commoners struggled in abject poverty. It was against this backdrop that Veblen, an economist and sociologist at the University of Chicago, wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, a book that brought the phrase “conspicuous consumption” into the modern vocabulary.
Veblen’s thesis centers on the definition of what he calls the “leisure class,” the upper social class consisting of wealthy individuals who are socially exempt from productive work. Their work instead becomes what he calls “conspicuous consumption”: spending their wealth in increasingly ostentatious ways in order to preserve their class status. Meanwhile, the lower and middle classes are the ones actually engaged in work that is productive to society—manufacturing and industry—with the goal of eventually being able to emulate the social status afforded by the conspicuous consumption of their leisure class masters.
Along the way, Veblen links these behaviors with social strictures left over from feudal society, arguing that contemporary human society has not evolved far beyond our medieval peasant-and-lord forefathers. In those ancient societies, productive labor came to be viewed as disreputable and dirty; thus, status is won not by accumulating wealth, but by displaying the evidence of wealth. He argues that many of what some would consider society’s ills are linked to this fundamental concept: for example, the mistreatment of women—forcing them into constricting clothing, preventing them from participating in independent economic life—is a way for their husbands to show off their unemployed status as a kind of conspicuous leisure; or society’s obsession with sports, celebrity, and organized religion, all forms of conspicuous leisure that bring no productive benefit to society, and on the contrary waste time and resources, but whose practitioners—superstars and clergy—maintain a high social status.
Though it was written over a hundred years ago when industrial society was just getting its footing, Veblen’s thesis predicts much of the social stratification we recognize today. Practical labor continues to be viewed as basically demeaning, while people struggle in vain to chase a glimmer of the vast wealth that celebrities, investors, bankers, hedge fund managers, and C-suite dwellers—the conspicuously-consuming leisure class of today—openly flaunt. As such, The Theory of the Leisure Class might be one of the most prescient and influential books of economic and social science of the 20th century.
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- Author: Thorstein Veblen
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For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated—the motive of adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it may be stated broadly that each successive innovation in the fashions is an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even feel that we have substantial ground for the hope that today, after all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently tenable artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more becoming than those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the other hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are more becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese, Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans, and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually, less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a display of expense are more readily detected in their structure.
These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations from place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples or classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in countries and localities and times where the population, or at least the class to which the costume in question belongs, is relatively homogeneous, stable, and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities, whose relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of fashion. The countries and classes which have in this way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods. So that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men—and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure—much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law
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