The Making of Modern Economics by Mark Skousen

Author:Mark Skousen [Mark Skousen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Veblen was famous for his extremely shy and taciturn personality. Colleagues, students, and visitors were put off by his apparent inability to carry on a conversation. He would be invited to dinner, and never say a word the entire evening. Once he attended a lecture by Jack London on socialism. Afterward, he was asked to make a comment, but said he had nothing to say. Upton Sinclair, an admirer, declared upon meeting him that “he was one of the most silent men I ever met. I do not think I ever met a man who would sit in a company and listen so long without ever speaking” (Dorfman 1934: 273, 423–24).

But, oh, how he could write! He wrote hundreds of articles and numerous books. A collection of essays from the Dial was compiled into The Engineers and the Price System (1921), a book that became all the rage after he died and the Great Depression ensued. (Albert Einstein was so convinced that he converted to socialism!) In one essay, Veblen wrote agreeably about the need for a “soviet of technicians,” engineers who would seize control of national industry and abolish private rights. Essentially, the essay concluded that the nation would benefit by the overthrow of capitalism, to be replaced by a Soviet-style group of engineers (Dorfman 1934: 512–13).

Veblen became one of the founders of the experimental New School for Social Research in New York City, along with Charles Beard and Wesley Mitchell. Veblen taught there for several years (his topic: socialism!) but, according to one colleague who met with him for lunch, “Veblen’s face throughout wore an expression of deep gloom, almost of despair. Nothing aroused him, or stirred more than a flicker of interest” (Jorgensen 1999: 164). He tired of teaching and in 1926 moved back to California.

His heart gave out in the summer of 1929, when he was seventy-two. Guido Marx, his colleague at Stanford and the New School for Social Research, described him in his later years: “If ever there lived a man at whose heart there was a snake constantly gnawing, Veblen was that man” (Jorgensen 1999: 182). But another biographer, Rick Tilman, commented upon his life: “Thorstein Veblen. . . was arguably the most original and penetrating economist and social critic that the United States has produced” (1992: ix).

Where Is Veblen's Tombstone?

Thorstein Veblen didn’t have a cemetery plot because he was cremated. After he died of a heart attack on August 3, 1929, a penciled note was found in his bedroom. “It is also my wish, in case of death, to be cremated . . . as expeditiously and inexpensively as may be, without ritual or ceremony of any kind: that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea or in some sizeable stream running to the sea, that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription or monument of any name or nature, be set in my memory . . . that no obituary, memorial, portrait or biography of me, nor any letters written to

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