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THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND HIS AMERICA --Joseph Dorfman--Viking ($3.75). In his lifetime (1857-1929) Thorstein Bunde Veblen had a few devoted disciples and a reputation as a brilliant eccentric among his fellow-sociologists, but he was not even a name to the U. S.-at-large.* When "Technocracy" flashed in its pan (1932), its brief publicity lit up Veblen's name by reflection, brought him a posthumous and garbled notoriety. But his reputation did not sputter out with Technocracy. Author Dorfman's detailed and scholarly book is the first full-length study of Thorstein Veblen and his views, but it will not be the last.

Sixth child of a family of twelve, Thorstein Veblen was born on a Wisconsin farm to parents who had migrated from Norway. Brought up in a clannish Norwegian community, Veblen spoke no English until he went to Carleton College at Northfield, Minn. There he quickly picked up proficiency in English, became so nice in his choice of words that he finally decided there were no synonyms in the language. After graduating high from Carleton, Veblen taught for a year in a Norwegian-community school, then went East to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale, take his Ph. D. He spent the rest of his life looking for a fitting academic rut. For a time he could find no job at all, disgusted his family by loafing at home. Finally he was offered an instructorship at the new Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago. He also taught at Stanford University, the University of Missouri, Manhattan's New School for Social Research. Except on a few unusual students Veblen made little impression in his lectures, in which he often seemed to be asleep, usually sat with his head on his hand, murmuring polysyllabically. But his first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), made a splash whose ripples are still spreading. Veblen was surprised at its popularity, annoyed that it was taken as a satire on aristocracy. Such Veblenian phrases as "conspicuous waste" became famed. So did the Veblenian style, which H. L. Mencken compared to "a constant roll of subway expresses," which Veblen himself parodied in such passages as:

"If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous, and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn, and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality and controlling principles?"

Veblen was neither a clubbable nor an attractive man (he never called any of his friends by their first names), but in spite of his poverty, his rawboned, stoop-shouldered, ungainly appearance, women liked him. He was twice married, twice had to resign a teaching post because of scandalous rumors. On the second occasion, when friends warned him of impending trouble, Veblen fatalistically replied: "What is one to do if the woman moves in on you?" This philosophic detachment was typical of him. He was accustomed to giving all his students the same low grade, never checked their attendance, seldom set examinations. He discouraged ingenuous questions with: "I don't know, I'm not bothered that way." When his second wife enthusiastically embroiled herself in discussions on Socialism with other faculty wives, Veblen would remark that either side could find enough books in the library to prove its case. In his house the beds were never made, simply turned down; dishes were washed only when the whole supply was dirty. In later life Veblen became an addict of detective stories, but was so ashamed of himself he used to hide the books under his mattress.

Veblen was no prophet of things-as-they-should-be but an analyst of things-as-they-are. He gave no answers, put many a stumping question. No one was ever quite sure just what Veblen himself believed. Biographer Dorfman hazards no opinion, concludes that "the question as to the exact nature of his influence remains still to be answered." A week before his death, in a little shack in Palo Alto, he penciled a typical testament: "It is ... my wish . . . that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea, or into some sizable stream running to the sea; that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription, or monument of any name or nature, be set up in my memory or name in any place or at any time; that no obituary, memorial, portrait or biography of me, nor any letters written to or by me be printed or published, or in any way reproduced, copied or circulated."

*To mathematicians the name Veblen means Oswald Veblen, Thorstein's nephew, at present professor of mathematics at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N. J.

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