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Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
US economist and social critic. His work promoted the idea that life in a modern industrial community is the result of a polar conflict between ‘pecuniary employments’ and ‘industrial employments’, between ‘business enterprise’ and ‘the machine process’, between ‘vendibility’ and ‘serviceability’ – in short, between making money and making goods. Veblen argued that there exists a class struggle under capitalism, not between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but between businessmen and engineers. Pecuniary habits of thought unite bankers, brokers, lawyers, and managers in a defence of private acquisition; in contrast, the discipline of the machine unites workers in industry and more especially the technicians and engineers who supervise them. It is in these terms that Veblen describes modern industrial civilization. Veblen was born in Cato, Wisconsin, into a large farming family of first-generation Norwegian immigrants. He graduated from Carleton College, Minnesota, in 1880, …
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein (1857-1929)

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
An American economist and sociologist, Veblen published a series of critical works on industrial society , notably The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor (1898), The Higher Learning in America (1918), The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919), and The Engineers and the Price…
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
An American social critic who held university posts at Chicago, Stanford and Missouri but remained an outsider in the academic community. He developed an economic sociology of capitalism that criticized the acquisitiveness and predatory competition of American society and the power of the…
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein

From The Great American History Fact-Finder
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein (1857-1929)

From Encyclopedia of American Business History
economist and social theorist Born in Wisconsin on the family farm, Veblen was the son of Norwegian immigrants who came to the United States in 1847. He graduated from Carleton College in three years and moved to Baltimore to do graduate work in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. Three years later, he…
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US economist and social critic. He attacked commercial values in his best-known work, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He was instrumental in breaking the hold of neo-classical economic theory and became a leader in the institutional school of economics. The corset is…a mutilation, undergone for…
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929), sociologist, economist, and social critic.

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History
Raised by frugal Norwegian parents on the Wisconsin frontier, Thorstein Veblen graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota and studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale Universities. At Yale he studied with the well-known sociologist and champion of social Darwinism William Graham Sumner. …
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Thorstein B. Veblen (Corbis Corporation...
The American political economist, sociologist, and social critic Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) wrote about the evolutionary development and mounting internal tensions of modern Western society. Thorstein Veblen was born on July 30, 1857, in Valders, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of twelve…
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The economist-cum-sociologist who developed the theory of the leisure class, Veblen was born into a family of Norwegian immigrant farmers who had settled into the Scandinavian farming community in Wato, Wisconsin, in the USA. After receiving his doctorate in economics from Yale University, he spent…
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Full text Article Veblen, Thorstein Bunde, 1857-1929

From Routledge Dictionary of Economics
A leading US institutionalist economist , famous for his analysis of conspicuous consumption . He was educated at Carleton College and Yale University, subsequently teaching economics at Chicago, Stanford, Missouri and New York. Inspired by a Darwinian evolutionary approach to the social sciences, …
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