Thorstein Veblen and the Myth of the Academic Outsider
Charles Camic on the birth of the modern research university, the
history of disciplinarity, and Veblen’s sex life.
ILLUSTRATION BY THE CHRONICLE; PHOTO FROM THE GRANGER COLLECTION
Chronicle of Higher Education REVIEW
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By Len Gutkin
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/len-gutkin>
DECEMBER 28, 2020
The social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen, best remembered
today for/The Theory of the Leisure Class/(1899), was born in 1857 to a
family of Wisconsin farmers who had emigrated from Norway. A Ph.D. and a
career as a professor would have seemed unlikely. But after graduating
from Carleton College, Veblen took advantage of the emergence of the
American research university (at Johns Hopkins, at Cornell, at Chicago,
at Yale) in the 1870s and 1880s to become something of a perennial
student, eventually earning a doctorate in philosophy and doing most of
the work toward a second doctorate, in political economy.
Charles Camic — a professor of sociology at Northwestern and author
of/Veblen:
<https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674659728>The Making
of an Economist Who Unmade Economics/, just out from Harvard University
Press — suggests that this extensive training may have made Veblen the
most formally educated American of his period. And it situated him
ideally to take a leading role in the development of the American
version of the professional academic. Veblen was a key member of the
generation of thinkers for whom, Camic writes, academe was becoming “a
recognized career on the country’s social landscape.”
Veblen’s first teaching position was at the University of Chicago, where
he both benefited from and contributed to the institutional emphasis on
rigorous research under William Rainey Harper, who helped found the
university. Marital problems and rumors of an affair got Veblen fired;
he was let go from his next job, at Stanford, for similar causes. Camic
quotes Veblen’s contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilmans on the
relationship that triggered his ouster from Stanford: “It seemed to me a
needless piece of sex extravagance.”
I spoke with Camic about Veblen’s entanglement with the modern research
university, the history of disciplinarity, the status of the academic
outsider, and Veblen’s sex life.
*One of your big arguments is that, despite his latter-day reputation as
an outsider, Veblen was in fact the consummate academic insider. He
spent his whole life in the academy and was entirely its creature. How
did the misrecognition emerge? Why are we attracted to it?*
A lot of academics want to see themselves as distinctive people with
distinctive backgrounds — as outsiders, even when that’s somewhat
implausible.
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Veblen has been an easy person to point back to among academics who want
to stand apart from the rest of the academy — whose intellectual
identity is bound up with being different from their philistine
contemporaries. C. Wright Mills is a great example of that. There’s not
much intellectual affinity between Mills’s work and Veblen’s. But Mills
wanted to find someone who was cast aside allegedly because of his
radical ideas: this suffering outsider. Veblen is a hook on which to
hang one’s marginality, even though it wasn’t true of Veblen in the
period when he wrote his work.
Thorstein Veblen in The Review
*Heather Steffen*,on the problem with faster time-to-degree.
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/reformers-want-faster-ph-d-s-theyre-wrong>
*Nick Romeo and Ian Tewksbury,*on why scholars can't trust businessmen.
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/you-cant-trust-the-businessmen-on-the-board-of-trustees>
*Christopher Newfield/,/*on professorial anger and The Higher
Learning.<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/professorial-anger-then-and-now/>
*Todd Gitlin,*on Veblen and Allan Bloom.
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/what-allan-bloom-got-right/>
*You write about “iconoclasm” as a period style in Veblen’s time. Are
there cognate fantasies of oppositionality in our own period?*
Those who subsequently describe Veblen as an outsider frequently rolled
out in support of that view the iconoclastic tone with which he put his
words on the page. But lots of academics of his time used that combative
way of writing. That didn’t make them outsiders. It went along with
their insider status. My friend Andy Abbott has speculated that the
identity of the rebel outsider goes back to artistic movements in France
in the early 19^th century.
It’s still a very popular identity — and often with a basis. Lots of
those who describe themselves as academic outsiders have been excluded
in despicable ways — the doors haven’t been open to them. There are
people who really/are/outsiders.
But it’s a misuse of the term to describe someone who’s had a fairly
comfortable life within the academy as an outsider, just because it
feels like a nice identity.
*One of Veblen’s fields of expertise was “political economy.” What was
that?An article
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/how-economists-became-so-timid/>in/The
Chronicle Review/from a couple of years ago, by Eric Posner and Glen
Weyl, argued for a return to “political economy” in these
terms:**“Political economists drew on all the streams of academic
speculation — they were as much philosophers as social scientists, and
they recognized none of the distinctions among the various contemporary
social sciences.”*
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If you had a room full of historians of economics, I doubt you’d get a
uniform answer, because those terms were greatly in flux. Before there
was the academic enterprise that we call economics, there was a set of
writings that went back to the 17th century and in some ways could even
be traced back to Aristotle talking about the household. “Political
economy” was advice to the prince on the fiscal management of the state.
Some of the threads in what we now call “economics” go back to that
earlier period and continue into the 19th century: advice to the
legislator on taxation, tariffs, whether currency should be gold-based
or paper-based — all issues that we would now locate in what we call
economics.
In the late 19th century, scholars moved into the academy. They were
speaking primarily to other academics. They embedded some of those old
issues in a more technical, theoretical apparatus.
In the mid-19th century, one of the great works of what we think of as
economics was John Stuart Mill’s/Principles of Political Economy./He saw
himself as giving advice to policy makers. Fifty years later, Alfred
Marshall wrote a great work called/Principles of Economics/. Broadly
speaking, with this linguistic change went a seismic shift from
discourse that was primarily aimed at policy makers to discourse aimed
at professional scholars.
Modern-day critics tend to use “political economy” to capture a more
outward-looking economics that would deal with widespread social changes.
*In Veblen’s time, that outward-looking tendency was often oriented to
Darwinian or evolutionary science, as then understood. Some of that part
of Veblen’s work now seems at best sort of silly and at worst part of
the most sinister racial discourse of the period. Since Veblen, has
economics engaged with evolutionary theory?*
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There’s a broad movement, anchored in England, that associates itself
with the banner of evolutionary economics and often taps into Veblen.
There’s a/Journal of Evolutionary Economics/, there’s an/Association
forEvolutionary Economics/, in which some of Veblen’s ideas, including
his more strictly evolutionary ideas, are frequently drawn upon. They
don’t use the same racialized vocabulary — thank God — that Veblen used,
but they want to capture something that Veblen and his contemporaries
really wanted to capture: change, the idea that everything was mutable.
There isn’t this thing called “the economy” that is more or less similar
whether we’re talking about one time and place or another time and place.
*One of the disciplines that track change or mutability over time is,
obviously, history. Veblen wasn’t a historian, but he was also
multidisciplinary in what to us look like promiscuous ways — involved in
philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and of course economics. That’s one
of the reasons that nonspecialists still like to read him*.*On the other
hand, he was an early devotee of disciplinary specialization.*
When we call Veblen multidisciplinary, we’re speaking a little bit
anachronistically. He certainly trained in a variety of fields, most
obviously philosophy and political economy. He also worked with several
historians and psychologists. So he had this multidisciplinary training
— but in a period when there weren’t yet disciplines.
Before the birth of the modern academy, in the 1880s and 1890s, what we
think of as “fields” were really just professorial chairs, not attached
to departments. A local businessman might be interested in political
economy, so he’d give Yale some money to found a chair in political
economy. The person put in that chair might be there for all sorts of
reasons — probably because he was known to the local gentleman who
ponied up the money. But subsequently, if someone established a chair in
sociology, that same person might move over into/that/chair if it paid more.
If one were interested in the sexual life of the professoriate at
the turn of the last century, it would be strange to omit Veblen.
Specialization becomes more defined in the late 1880s and early ‘90s, at
Cornell. The real explosion of department-creation comes at the
University of Chicago in the early ‘90s, right when Veblen is there.
Chicago is specializing, and Veblen, as usual, has his ear to the
ground. When someone at Chicago suggested that maybe Veblen wanted to
teach a course in sociology now and then, he was very emphatic: “I don’t
know about sociology.” It takes a long time for specialization to
develop. But once it does, it catches on like wildfire.
Veblen’s work has a multidisciplinary flavor not only because his
training was multidisciplinary, but also because there was a similar
mind-set that cut across different disciplines at the time, because so
many of the scholars were trained in the German historical school. There
was an emphasis on things like mutability and on wholes being greater
than the sum of their parts. Veblen picks up this language, but he
crafts it to tackle what are becoming more specialized problems in
economics.
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*Among the many fields that you yourself draw on are the history and
philosophy of science. You mention, for instance, Peter Galison’s notion
of “trading zones” — border zones between disciplines where, in your
paraphrase, “similarities that are only superficial ... nevertheless
allow productive intergroup dialogue to take place.” In Veblen’s period,
where were those trading zones especially rich?*
In the 1880s and early 1890s, there were lots of streams of
conversation: a more philosophically inflected discourse involving Kant
and Hegel, a more anthropological conversation in which
proto-anthropologists spun their tales of Indigenous peoples the world
over, and so on. These conversations overlapped in different ways in
different degrees, because there weren’t neat barriers between
disciplines. There were many trading zones, where different things were
traded for different periods of time and for different purposes. The
anthropologists talked about “the mutability of human nature,“ while the
biologists talked about the mutability of characteristics in species
over the long haul of time. There’s a trading zone: They’d be both
talking about mutability and change, but, in fact, they’re talking about
something different.
The width and depth of trading zones really change a lot in the period
of the formation of universities. The 1890s is a moment of big change.
The zones were wide and open — a lot of free trade in those trading
zones — in the 1880s. But by the turn of the century, the zones close.
*I’m curious about the trading-zone metaphor as it applies to the social
sciences and the humanities, rather than what Galison is talking about
originally — collaborations in the hard sciences, between physicists and
engineers for instance. One of the things that is so interesting about
your book is that you seem consistently engaged with questions proper to
epistemology and to the philosophy of science — how terms of art in
different disciplines refer to different real phenomena, and how
disciplines themselves understand this relation.*
I have a very strong self-identity with science studies, which is very
open in its boundaries. It includes people ranging from medical school
to French literature and so on. It’s a very encompassing field. Some of
the ideas that inform it do come from the philosophy of science. The
field in many ways originates in the ‘60s with Thomas Kuhn, who was very
engaged with philosophical issues. So inasmuch as I’m a citizen in the
world of science studies, which has a nontrivial philosophy-of-science
component, it’s a component of how I think of things.
But I couldn’t publish anything I’ve ever written in a
philosophy-of-science journal — even with five revise-and-resubmits.
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*Let’s talk about Veblen’s/The Higher Learning in America/, which
criticizes what he saw as the tendency to run universities like businesses.*
It was written as part of the 1904 book/The Theory of Business
Enterprise/. It applied some of that book’s ideas to the running of the
university. Veblen was thinking particularly of the University of
Chicago’s President Harper, who was very sensitive to donors and who
established a business school. Veblen was horrified at the notion of
business schools.
In 1904, that component of the book got sliced off. There’s no clear
answer as to why. The two prevalent views are that publishers, then as
now, prefer short over long. The other explanation is that Harper was
the reviewer of the book and didn’t like Chicago represented as a
business enterprise — so he told the publisher that that chapter had to go.
*/Higher Learning/comes up often in essays by/Chronicle
Review/contributors. In the past six months we’ve published two, one of
which we called — you can’t blame the authors for this — “You Can’t
Trust the Businessmen on the Board of Trustees.” What can today’s
academics learn from Veblen about their own social or economic role?*
In terms of the basic dichotomy that underlies a lot of Veblen’s work —
the distinction between “industrial” work, by which he means work that
contributes to the good of the community, and “pecuniary work,” which
has as its aim profit-making — it’s not clear where the specialized
academic falls.
Veblen doesn’t adequately resolve that. I think he can’t. He’s premised
so much of his theory on that simple dichotomy. In Veblen’s conception,
the specialized academic produces knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is not pursuing it for an
industrial or a pecuniary purpose.
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Real ideas, Veblen says, come serendipitously. The university has to
preserve that. Any other purpose — including laudatory social welfare —
is deeply problematic for him, insofar it impinges on the unhampered
pursuit of knowledge.
*In an otherwise appreciativereview
<https://www-wsj-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/veblen-review-scourge-of-the-elites-11606504616>of
your book in/The Wall Street Journal/, Zachary D. Carter takes you to
task for spending too little time on the marital scandals that afflicted
Veblen at both Chicago and Stanford. Next time, will you leaven the
disciplinary details with more stuff from your subject’s sex life?*
Carter is wrong in his description of the private life, just
incidentally. He makes it racier than it actually was. But inasmuch as
the private life impacts the career story that I’m telling, I do go into it.
Carter counts three or four affairs. Unless he has access to Thorstein
Veblen’s deep confessions, I don’t know where he’s coming up with these
other affairs! If one were interested in the sexual life of the
professoriate at the turn of the last century, it would be strange to
omit Veblen. But if I were writing/that/book — which I wouldn’t be
interested in writing — it would be incumbent on me to say that this
reputation of sleeping with every graduate student who came to his
office is false.
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