Thorstein Veblen at the University of Chicago and the Socialization Of Aesthetics

Abstract

From the time of its publication in 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class was hailed as outrageous and delightful and, at least by some, as unerringly accurate in describing American buccaneer capitalism.' Although was to become a classic in economics and sociology, has only been recognized intermittently as a key text in the analysis of material culture and as a dramatized account of design aesthetics. In his 1947 book on the history of fashion design, Quentin Bell wrote that the book was undoubtedly the most valuable contribution yet made to the philosophy of clothes...., but he acknowledged, it has been strangely neglected by our historians of fashion. 2 Not only Veblen but other scholars at the University of Chicago at the turn of the century constructed philosophies of art that attempted to integrate the fine arts and design with the rest of human experience. During this period of industrialization and the development of a consumer economy, these men introduced a social dimension to the study of aesthetics. Their ideas represented an alternative view of aesthetic values and a new attitude to the highlow dichotomy in the arts, in contrast to philosophers and connoisseurs, such as Henry Rutgers Marshall and Bernard Berenson, who were content to work within the hierarchical canon of art as codified in the eighteenth century.3 For design historians, they provide a different perspective of the time-in sharp contrast to both the contempt espoused by these guardians of high culture for machinemade products, as well as the anti-intellectualism of those who defended the applied and industrial arts. The difficulty of such an undertaking is acknowledged by Jerry Palmer in his introduction to Design and Aesthetics: We start from the commonplace recognition that 'an aesthetics of design' is always problematic insofar as 'design' and 'aesthetics' refer to divergent traditions of understanding creative activity-indeed to different traditions of such activity. 4 Aesthetics as a discipline has been closely related to metaphysics and spiritual experience, while design has been dealt with primarily through histories of technology and commerce. When has been treated as part of the history of art, is considered to be of lesser aesthetic value. The following essay is an examination of some of the earliest attempts, by acade1 Citations in this essay refer to the 1994 Penguin Book's edition, with an introduction by Robert Lekachman, hereafter TLC. 2 Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (London: The Hogarth Press, 1947), 11. Sociologist Chandra Mukerji used Veblen's ideas in analyzing the transformation of movies from industrial commodities to a medium for artistic expression in Artwork: