page_title: The Theory of the Leisure Class
section_title: Critical opinions
hierarchical_section_title: The Theory of the Leisure Class / Critical opinions
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Thorstein Veblen 1857-1929.
context_page_description: The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labour, which are social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
  Veblen asserts that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society, while it is the middle class and the working class who are usefully employed in the industrialised, productive occupations that support the whole of society.
context_section_description: The 19th century
  The publishing success of The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899) derived from the fidelity, accuracy, and veracity of Thorstein Veblen's reportage of the social and economic behavior of American society; yet, some contemporaries considered that Veblen's intellectualism made him an iconoclast who was "more than a little mad". In that vein, despite the success (financial, academic, social) accrued to him by the book, another contemporary social scientist told Veblen that the sociology of gross consumerism cataloged in The Theory of the Leisure Class had much "fluttered the dovecotes of the East", especially in the Ivy League academic Establishment.
  In the contemporary (19th-century) book review '"The Theory of the Leisure Class" (September 1899), John Cummings wrote:
  As a contribution to the general theory of sociology, Dr. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class requires no other commendation for its scholarly performance than that which a casual reading of the work readily inspires. Its highly original character makes any abridgement of it exceedingly difficult and inadequate, and such an abridgement cannot be even attempted here . . . The following pages, however, are devoted to a discussion of certain points of view in which the author seems, to the writer [Cummings], to have taken an incomplete survey of the facts, or to have allowed his interpretation of facts to be influenced by personal animus.
  — John Cummings, "The Theory of the Leisure Class", The Journal of Political Economy, September – 1899, p. 425.
  In the two-part book review "An Opportunity for American Fiction" (April–May 1899), the critic William Dean Howells made Veblen's treatise the handbook of sociology and economics for the American intelligentsia of the early 20th century. He reviewed first the economics and then the social satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions; and reported that class anxiety impels American society to wasteful consumerism, especially the pursuit of social prestige by owning consumer goods. That, despite social classes being alike in most stratified societies, the novelty of the American social-class system was that the leisure class had only recently appeared in U.S. history.
  Howells concluded the book review by calling upon a novelist to translate into fiction the message reported by the social-scientist Veblen, because a novel of manners was an opportunity for American fiction to accessibly communicate the satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class:
   It would be easy to burlesque [the American leisure class], but to burlesque it would be intolerable, and the witness [Veblen] who did this would be bearing false testimony where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is desirable. A democracy, the proudest, the most sincere, the most ardent that history has ever known, has evolved here a leisure class which has all the distinguishing traits of a patriciate, and which by the chemistry of intermarriage with European aristocracies is rapidly acquiring antiquity. Is not this a phenomenon worthy the highest fiction? Mr. Veblen has brought to its study the methods and habits of scientific inquiry. To translate these into dramatic terms would form the unequalled triumph of the novelist who had the seeing eye and the thinking mind, not to mention the feeling heart. That such a thing has not been done hitherto is all the stranger, because fiction, in other countries, has always employed itself with the leisure class, with the aristocracy; and our own leisure class now offers not only as high an opportunity as any which fiction has elsewhere enjoyed, but by its ultimation in the English leisure class, it invites the American imagination abroad on conditions of unparalleled advantage.
  — William Dean Howells, "An Opportunity for American Fiction"Literature: An International Gazette of Criticism, No. 17, 5 May 1899. pp. 361–62.
  The 20th century
  Twenty years later, in the book review “Professor Veblen” (1919), about the 
caption: In The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), Thorstein Veblen said that the U.S. was imitating the socially static monarchy of the United Kingdom.
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