On his book Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics
Cover Interview of June 23, 2021
The wide angle
I came to write
Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this
was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency
of intellectual historians to elide the schooling of the figure—the thinker, the
protagonist—whose ideas they are analyzing.
I have read scores
of intellectual biographies. Some simply ignore the protagonist’s schooling; some
compress it into a sentence or paragraph. Some—those I myself have found most
useful—devote a chapter or two to the ideas of one or two mentors who “influenced”
the protagonist before she/he/they began their own careers. Unusual is the
intellectual biography that ranges wider and digs deeper into the schooling
process.
In some cases, this
near-silent treatment is justified. In myriad ways, education occurs in all
societies; it is a universal process. But the same cannot be said of
“schooling” when we use the term to refer, less amorphously, to blocks of time—hours,
days, months, years—allocated specifically to the activities of teaching and
learning, whether these activities go on in homes, church basements, apprentice
workshops, or the brick buildings called “schools.” The incidence of schooling
in this sense rises and falls across different eras and social groups.
Now when the intellectual
historian’s protagonist hails from a period or a group where schooling was a
rare experience, the historian can hardly be faulted for neglecting schooling. Conversely,
I know of no justification for the historian to skip school when the
protagonist was schooled for extended periods of time. That, of course, is the
case with all of us today. And it was already the case for Thorstein Veblen and
a growing number of his (white, male, Protestant) contemporaries, especially
those who, like him, came from well-off families and aspired to professional
careers—academic careers, in particular.
Yet, one of the
first things I noticed when I began research on my book was that Veblen scholars
were cut from the same cloth as most other intellectual historians. Their overwhelming
tendency was to ignore Veblen’s schooling altogether, even though he was one of
the most thoroughly schooled members of his generation. Indeed, he was still a
fulltime graduate student at age 35, by which point he was just a few years away
from beginning his most famous book.
Among Veblen
scholars, I could count exceptions to this tendency on one hand. What was more,
even the few scholars who broke from it deemed sufficient abbreviated accounts of the
work of a couple of Veblen’s mentors. This method, while preferable to wholesale
neglect, precluded considering whether Veblen’s ideas were shaped not merely by
his contact with a couple teachers, but by the cumulative impact of his experiences
with a phalanx of teachers.
My book takes a
different tack. It pries open the black box of Veblen’s schooling using a
method that has been surprisingly underutilized by Veblen scholars (and many
other intellectual historians). My research goes down into the weeds, combing through
Veblen’s academic records, copies of reading lists for the courses he took, and
unpublished lecture notes by his teachers. It also digs into neglected contemporaneous
printed sources, like the annual “catalogues,” “registers,” and “circulars” of
the college and the universities he attended.
Veblen illustrates
the value of these underestimated materials for excavating the early lives and schooling
experiences of social thinkers prior to the start of their intellectual
careers. The book places schooling front and center, which is where I believe
it belongs when we study the intellectual development of well-schooled figures
like Thorstein Veblen.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
I came to write Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency of intellectual historians to elide the schooling of the figure—the thinker, the protagonist—whose ideas they are analyzing.
I have read scores of intellectual biographies. Some simply ignore the protagonist’s schooling; some compress it into a sentence or paragraph. Some—those I myself have found most useful—devote a chapter or two to the ideas of one or two mentors who “influenced” the protagonist before she/he/they began their own careers. Unusual is the intellectual biography that ranges wider and digs deeper into the schooling process.
In some cases, this near-silent treatment is justified. In myriad ways, education occurs in all societies; it is a universal process. But the same cannot be said of “schooling” when we use the term to refer, less amorphously, to blocks of time—hours, days, months, years—allocated specifically to the activities of teaching and learning, whether these activities go on in homes, church basements, apprentice workshops, or the brick buildings called “schools.” The incidence of schooling in this sense rises and falls across different eras and social groups.
Now when the intellectual historian’s protagonist hails from a period or a group where schooling was a rare experience, the historian can hardly be faulted for neglecting schooling. Conversely, I know of no justification for the historian to skip school when the protagonist was schooled for extended periods of time. That, of course, is the case with all of us today. And it was already the case for Thorstein Veblen and a growing number of his (white, male, Protestant) contemporaries, especially those who, like him, came from well-off families and aspired to professional careers—academic careers, in particular.
Yet, one of the first things I noticed when I began research on my book was that Veblen scholars were cut from the same cloth as most other intellectual historians. Their overwhelming tendency was to ignore Veblen’s schooling altogether, even though he was one of the most thoroughly schooled members of his generation. Indeed, he was still a fulltime graduate student at age 35, by which point he was just a few years away from beginning his most famous book.
Among Veblen scholars, I could count exceptions to this tendency on one hand. What was more, even the few scholars who broke from it deemed sufficient abbreviated accounts of the work of a couple of Veblen’s mentors. This method, while preferable to wholesale neglect, precluded considering whether Veblen’s ideas were shaped not merely by his contact with a couple teachers, but by the cumulative impact of his experiences with a phalanx of teachers.
My book takes a different tack. It pries open the black box of Veblen’s schooling using a method that has been surprisingly underutilized by Veblen scholars (and many other intellectual historians). My research goes down into the weeds, combing through Veblen’s academic records, copies of reading lists for the courses he took, and unpublished lecture notes by his teachers. It also digs into neglected contemporaneous printed sources, like the annual “catalogues,” “registers,” and “circulars” of the college and the universities he attended.
Veblen illustrates the value of these underestimated materials for excavating the early lives and schooling experiences of social thinkers prior to the start of their intellectual careers. The book places schooling front and center, which is where I believe it belongs when we study the intellectual development of well-schooled figures like Thorstein Veblen.