economic treatise by Thorstein Veblen, published in 1899. The book enjoyed a popular vogue and profoundly influenced economic thought, but provoked controversial replies, of which the most sensational was Mencken's Professor Veblen in Prejudices (1919).
This description of habits and customs in modern life as “atavistic cultural survivals” contends that the institution of the Leisure Class arose during a predatory stage of barbarism, in conjunction with the institution of ownership. This was foreshadowed during the initial stage of peaceful savagery, when there began to be distinctions between the status of men and women. Woman's work, creation by the manipulation of inanimate materials, symbolized the instinct of workmanship and the beginning of industry. Man's work came to symbolize the advent of nonindustrial employments by acts of exploit, “the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other by another agent.” Employment of other classes for wages is the modern form of exploit of that class, which emerges from the predatory stage as a social group living without recourse to industrial employment. The Leisure Class in the modern environment consists of those who enjoy freedom from irksome and undignified labor and who through successful acts of aggression are bent upon establishing their honorific distinction by conspicuous leisure and notable accumulations of wealth. Entrance to this class is by pecuniary fitness, which is exhibited by conspicuously wasteful consumption, setting standards according to canons of taste determined by wealth. This class, by force of mutual interest and instinct, and by precept and proscriptive example, not only perpetuates the existing maladjustment of institutions, but even favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life.
The Oxford Companion to American Literature. © 1995
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