Conspicuous presumption

Veblen skewers the leisure class

Conspicuous consumption existed before Thorstein Veblen gave it a name. Pharaohs built pyramids to flaunt their wealth and power. Medici princes commissioned art to burnish their reputations. Indigenous chiefs on the northwest coast of North America hosted extravagant feasts called potlatches to one-up their rivals.

But it took the gimlet eye and razored pen of Veblen to make conspicuous consumption a common phrase. This son of Norwegian immigrants to the American Midwest grew up in circumstances modest in everything but education, which his parents lavished on their twelve children, including the girls. Thorstein graduated from Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, at the height of America's Gilded Age. He proceeded east to Johns Hopkins and then Yale, en route observing the Manhattan manifestations of capitalism's most obvious excesses.

After some academic throat-clearing, in 1899 he published The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen recognized, not least since it was obvious to all in America at the time, that beyond a certain point wealth was more about status than about living standards. William Vanderbilt built the biggest mansion in New York not because he needed the living space but because he coveted his place at the top of the city's pecking order. And he built it on Fifth Avenue rather than on a country estate because it would serve its purpose only if everyone could see it. “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men,” wrote Veblen, “it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.”

If Veblen he had been a journalist, like the young Henry Adams, he might simply have documented the behavior of America’s nouveau riche. Had he been a novelist—Edith Wharton, say—he might have satirized it in story. But Veblen’s education had made him a social scientist, and so he felt obliged to build a theory to explain what he saw. Economics was his primary field, yet he moonlighted in sociology and, to explain the rituals of the leisure class, anthropology.

Veblen took care to comment that his use of the word leisure wasn’t meant to imply sloth or inactivity. Indeed, America’s upper classes were often busy. But their busy-ness was deliberately divorced from constructive labor. “Abstention from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing,” he wrote. Prowess at polo required years of practice, for the men. Women would spend months planning elaborate dinners and balls.

Education of a certain sort was a characteristic of the leisure class. “In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the ‘humanities’,” Veblen wrote. Study of dead languages like Greek and Latin, art appreciation classes, even English composition past the point of serviceability sent the desired signals that the student wouldn’t be working for a living.

Ritual learning extended beyond the classroom. Men and women alike needed to know the latest fashions in dress and furniture, what games and sports were popular, which breeds of dogs were currently appropriate to their masters’ station in life. The rituals of consumption included food, drink and other substances ingested. “The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.”

Again, the point of the consumption was its conspicuousness. “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.”

Veblen didn’t contend that conspicuous consumption was only about besting one’s rivals. “In the giving of costly entertainments, other motives, of more genial kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these motives are also present in the later development.” But the customs had acquired new meaning in the new age. “They also serve an invidious purpose”—of putting rivals at a social disadvantage—“and they serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious ground in these more avowable motives.”

Veblen’s book didn’t endear him to its subjects, who preferred to think their activities served purposes more elevated than making them top primate in the troop. He had difficulty finding and holding academic jobs. He developed a reputation for womanizing, which might have been earned but might also have been a convenient way for university presidents to rid themselves of one who threatened their endowments. Veblen turned his scrutiny on them in The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. This rendered him even less employable, and he retired to California, where he died in 1929.