Veblen by Charles Camic

Author:Charles Camic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

7.

Still, Veblen knew that Harper and Laughlin both valued research and publication over teaching and administrative service, and here too he hit the ground running. In his first year at Chicago, Veblen published two substantial research articles and two book reviews. These earned him his rapid promotion onto the faculty as a reader—an upward move Harper authorized for none of the other holders of graduate fellowships in the political economy department. In his second year, Veblen followed this auspicious beginning with two more (shorter) articles, six book reviews, and an eight-hundred-page translation into English of a high-profile German economic treatise. And again, Harper quickly rewarded him, elevating Veblen to the rank of associate (or tutor), despite the president’s reluctance to advance anyone up the ladder, let alone to approve two promotions in two years for one junior member of his faculty.145

But the promise of Veblen’s scholarship and his successful completion of the German-to-English translation caught Harper’s favorable attention. The book Veblen translated as The Science of Finance was System der Finanzwissenschaft (hereafter, Finanzwissenschaft) by Gustav Cohn, a German economist then acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic for two connected reasons. For one, economists regarded Cohn’s writings as embodying a “golden mean” between the Older School’s commitment to abstract theory and the Younger School’s emphasis on historical research. In addition, economists saw Gustav Cohn’s work, particularly his Finanzwissenschaft of 1889, as addressing what Veblen’s colleague Miller spoke of as an acute need for a “systematic treatise covering the subject of public finance”—a subject with urgency in the United States and Europe during the 1880s and 1890s because of changes taking place in the ways nations and states taxed their populations to pay for government spending. At Cornell, this subject had been one of Veblen’s two minors in political economy, and Laughlin and Miller made it a core part of the economics program at Chicago, even as they lamented the shortage of English-language works on public finance. In this context, the three men hatched the idea of translating Cohn’s Finanzwissenschaft into English, and of making this volume the first entry in a monograph series Laughlin had just launched, Economic Studies of the University of Chicago. Responsibility for the translation devolved onto Veblen, and it occupied him intensively from mid-1892 to mid-1894—with the approval of Harper and Laughlin both. (Sometime translators themselves, the two men viewed translation as a serious form of scholarship.)146

This project was a smart career move on Veblen’s part, whether or not he thought of it this way. It hitched his name to that of an internationally renowned writer and to a topic of pressing academic and lay concern; and the positive reactions that contemporaries showed to the translation—which appeared in 1895 as The Science of Finance—redounded to Veblen at a time when his own scholarly reputation was still in the making. More important, Cohn’s book fed the reservoir of knowledge practices Veblen had been building up, absorbing him in the use of these practices during the hundreds of

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