The Higher Learning in America
by Thorstein Veblen
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Since its publication in 1918, Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America has remained a text that every serious student of the American university must confront. Intellectual historian Richard Teichgraeber brings us the first scholarly edition of Veblen's classic, thoroughly edited, annotated, and indexed. An extensive introduction discusses the book's composition and publishing history, Veblen's debts to earlier critics of the American university, and the place of The Higher show more Learning in America in current debates about the American university. Veblen's insights into the American university system at the outset of the twentieth century are as provocative today as they were when first published. Insisting that institutions of higher learning should be dedicated solely to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he urged American universities to abandon commitments to extraneous pursuits such as athletics, community service, and vocational education. He also believed that the corporate model of governance--with university boards of trustees dominated by well-to-do businessmen and university presidents who functioned essentially as businessmen in academic dress--mandated unsavory techniques of salesmanship and self-promotion that threatened to reduce institutions of higher learning to the status of competitive business enterprises. With a detailed chronology, suggested readings, and comprehensive notes identifying events, individuals, and institutions to which Veblen alludes, this volume is sure to become the standard teaching text for Veblen's classic work and an invaluable resource for students of both the history and the current workings of the American university. show lessTags
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Veblen never fails to make me laugh. In this case his argument is substantially the same one I made myself (in The Bubble Boys: How Mistaken Educational Ideals and Practices are Causing a Warped Social Fabric), but the approach is from a different angle. He sets the goal of business as separate from the goal of disinterested scholarship and goes from there to explain how the university system, in his time starting to be controlled by businessmen, has shifted its focus to ostentatious display (conspicuous consumption) and advertising rather than actually educating. Well worth the read, though Veblen's use of language remains extraordinarily difficult.
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Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and social scientist best known for challenging the economic theories of his time. He rejected the neat logic and natural laws of his contemporaries, asserting instead that economic order was evolutionary and that this evolution was strongly influenced by institutions such as labor unions, business show more organizations, schools, and even churches. In so doing, Veblen laid the basis for what is now known as the institutional school of economics. Veblen was often described as being an aloof and isolated, albeit gifted, misfit. His sense of isolation was established early; he was born on a farm in rural Wisconsin to immigrant Norwegian parents. English was spoken only as a second language in the tight-knit Norwegian community and Veblen did not perfect his use of the language until he entered college. A voracious reader with a distinct aversion to farm work, he was sent to nearby Carleton College to study for the Lutheran ministry. While at Carleton, Veblen alienated some of the faculty with inflammatory and agnostic writings, and, although he graduated in 1880, it was without the divinity degree that would have enabled him to teach at one of the many small religious colleges of the time. After graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, he returned to his parents' home, where he spent the next seven years relaxing, reading, and doing odd jobs. In 1888 he married Ellen Rolfe, much to the dismay of her uncle who happened to be the president of Carleton College. During this period, Veblen had little luck finding a job, even with the benefit of his wife's and her uncle's connections. Finally, at the age of 34, Veblen went to Cornell University to seek a teaching position. Despite his frontier appearance---corduroy trousers and coonskin cap---he was given a one-year teaching assignment. The next year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he taught until 1906. While at the University of Chicago, he wrote two of his most important works, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). The Theory of the Leisure Class was an insightful, if not contemptuous, analysis of the excess consumption and wasteful behavior of the wealthy. Veblen contended that the modern quest for the accumulation of money, and its lavish display, was derived from the predatory barbarian practice of seizing goods and wealth without work. In The Theory of Business Enterprise, he described the heads of corporate enterprises as saboteurs of the economic system---people interested only in the financing of production rather than the process of production. This was a radical view, but Veblen was writing during the period when the "robber barons" seemed obsessed by the profits that could be made from stock flotations, bond issues, and other complex financial deals. Veblen's notorious womanizing cost him his position with the University of Chicago in 1906. He moved on to Stanford University, then the University of Missouri, and finally to the New School for Social Research in New York, where he taught briefly before retiring to a small rustic cabin in California. Divorced from his wife in 1911, he remarried in 1914, but his second wife was institutionalized shortly after for psychological problems. Veblen was one of the most provocative economists of his time, but his ideas were such that he attracted few disciples. Even so, economists have come to recognize the importance of institutions and their impact on economic behavior. Additional testament to the influence of his work is the fact that many of the terms he coined are in wide use today, among them conspicuous consumption conspicuous consumption, the leisure class, and cultural lag. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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