The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (phonics readers TXT) 📕
Description
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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The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social structure but also upon the individual character of the members of society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given point of view has won acceptance as an authoritative standard or norm of life it will react upon the character of the members of the society which has accepted it as a norm. It will to some extent shape their habits of thought and will exercise a selective surveillance over the development of men’s aptitudes and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive, educational adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly by a selective elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of descent. Such human material as does not lend itself to the methods of life imposed by the accepted scheme suffers more or less elimination as well as repression. The principles of pecuniary emulation and of industrial exemption have in this way been erected into canons of life, and have become coercive factors of some importance in the situation to which men have to adapt themselves.
These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and industrial exemption affect the cultural development both by guiding men’s habits of thought, and so controlling the growth of institutions, and by selectively conserving certain traits of human nature that conduce to facility of life under the leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective temper of the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of a leisure class in shaping human character runs in the direction of spiritual survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a community is of the nature of an arrested spiritual development. In the later culture especially, the institution has, on the whole, a conservative trend. This proposition is familiar enough in substance, but it may to many have the appearance of novelty in its present application. Therefore a summary review of its logical grounds may not be uncalled for, even at the risk of some tedious repetition and formulation of commonplaces.
Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of temperament and habits of thought under the stress of the circumstances of associated life. The adaptation of habits of thought is the growth of institutions. But along with the growth of institutions has gone a change of a more substantial character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing exigencies have also brought about a correlative change in human nature. The human material of society itself varies with the changing conditions of life. This variation of human nature is held by the later ethnologists to be a process of selection between several relatively stable and persistent ethnic types or ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true, more or less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature that have in their main features been fixed in approximate conformity to a situation in the past which differed from the situation of today. There are several of these relatively stable ethnic types of mankind comprised in the populations of the Western culture. These ethnic types survive in the race inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable moulds, each of a single precise and specific pattern, but in the form of a greater or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic types has resulted under the protracted selective process to which the several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the prehistoric and historic growth of culture.
This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a selective process of considerable duration and of a consistent trend, has not been sufficiently noticed by the writers who have discussed ethnic survival. The argument is here concerned with two main divergent variants of human nature resulting from this, relatively late, selective adaptation of the ethnic types comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest being the probable effect of the situation of today in furthering variation along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order to avoid any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of types and variants and the scheme of reversion and survival in which they are concerned are here presented with a diagrammatic meagerness and simplicity which would not be admissible for any other purpose. The man of our industrial communities tends to breed true to one or the other of three main ethic types; the dolichocephalic-blond, the brachycephalic-brunette, and the Mediterranean—disregarding minor and outlying elements of our culture. But within each of these main ethnic types the reversion tends to one or the other of at least two main directions of variation; the peaceable or ante-predatory variant and the predatory variant. The former
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