The Theory of The Leisure Class - Criticism

Criticism

About author, book, and thesis of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the American intellectual H. L. Mencken said::

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one — or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists — or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver — or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman — or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?

— Mencken, Professor Veblen, Prejudices, First Series, 1919

Nonetheless, despite such disagreement, Mencken considered the game of golf to be a conspicuous leisure activity, of no useful function. Attempts at a definitive denotation of the theory of conspicuous consumption have been criticised as “élitist”, most notably the pertinent works of Herbert Marcuse, wherein a group of hyper-educated people is empowered to define what items of consumption become luxury commodities. In The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), Robert Heilbroner said that, although valid for their late 19th-century time (the Gilded Age of the 1890s), the economic and sociologic theories of Thorstein Veblen have limited, contemporary application, because the studies are specific to the societies of the U.S. and the city of Chicago.