The Theory of The Leisure Class - Literary Style

Literary Style

Although a socio-economic treatise about economic consumption, Thorstein Veblen’s language in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is idiosyncratic and satirical in its presentation of the consumerist mores of modern American society.

A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable one, is afforded by a certain King of France who was said to have lost his life in the observance of good form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master’s seat, the King sat uncomplaining before the fire, and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But, in so doing, he saved his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.

The publishing success of The Theory of the Leisure Class derives from Veblen’s pointed sociological reportage; the writer and critic William Dean Howells favourably reviewed the book as an economic treatise and as a social satire about the American way of life, and the pursuit of prestige through the ownership of consumer goods. The satirical usages of the word “evolve”, in describing the socio-economic behaviour of the Leisure Class, underscore the proposition that a social class cannot evolve, given its human nature, and because the concept of “evolution by natural selection” is inapplicable to an industrial society whose fundamental system of values remains that of a barbarian tribe from the feudal period of human history. Nonetheless, Thorstein Veblen’s reports of the business-cycle behaviour of businessmen in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), is straightforwardly objective. Nevertheless, in the opinion of Robert Lekachman, an interpretive problem arises from the personality of Thorstein Veblen, whom he considered a misanthrope; thus, in his Introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition of The Theory of the Leisure Class, he said:

As a child, Veblen was a notorious tease, and an inveterate inventor of malicious nicknames. As an adult, Veblen developed this aptitude into the abusive category and the cutting analogy. In this volume the most striking categories are four in number: Conspicuous Consumption, Vicarious Consumption, Conspicuous Leisure, and Conspicuous Waste. It is amazing what a very large proportion of social activity, higher education, devout observance, and upper-class consumer goods seemed to fit snugly into one, or another, of these classifications.

— Lekachman, Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1967)

That opinion was seconded by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in his introduction to the 1973 Houghton Mifflin edition of The Theory of the Leisure Class, wherein he proposes that the book is Veblen’s intellectual put-down of American society; and that Veblen might have spoken satirically in order to soften the negative social implications of his social and economic analyses — because they are more threatening to the socio-economic status quo of American society than are the implications of the like analyses by Karl Marx. That, unlike Marx, who recognised that capitalism was superior to feudalism in providing goods and services, Veblen did not recognise that distinction, because capitalism was just a form of barbarism, and that goods and services, for conspicuous consumption, are fundamentally worthless.