Veblen, Thorstein (1857—1929) Norwegian-American sociologist and pioneering cultural theorist. His best known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), spawned the well-known phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’, which so aptly describes the antics of the super wealthy. Veblen was born in Wisconsin. His well-to-do parents were recent immigrants from Norway who spoke Norwegian at home. He obtained a BA in economics from Carleton College in Minnesota. He then did graduate work, first at Johns Hopkins University, under the founder of American pragmatism, Peirce, Charles Sanders, and then at Yale, where he completed a PhD in 1884. In 1891 he was appointed professor of economics at the newly created University of Chicago. He taught there until 1906, when he moved to Stanford. He was to remain at Stanford only a short time, moving to the University of Missouri in 1911. In 1919 he moved to New York, taking a position as an editor for The Dial (then in its heyday as the audacious publisher of modernism works by T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ezra Pound, among others). During this period he collaborated with Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey to establish the New School for Social Research. If Veblen’s work is still a standard feature of introductory sociology courses it is because of The Theory of the Leisure Class, which is at once a biting satire and a keen analysis of the social use of wealth in the early part of the twentieth century. What intrigued (and disgusted) Veblen was the way money was spent uselessly by the scions of the so-called ‘Gilded Age’ merely to demonstrate that they could afford it. He also analysed the way the wealthy classes adopt certain fashions, emulating one another so as to reassure themselves of their belonging together. Further Reading: J. Diggins Thorstein Veblen (1999).