Veblen: A Critical Reconsideration*

Abstract

Generations of Thorstein Veblen scholars have formed their ideas and derived their basic information on the subject through a careful reading of the monumental biography by Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America} There are good reasons for this. Dorfman's work is not only a biography in the current sense. It has a higher ambition: Veblen's texts and vicissitudes are connected with the general context of his times?from fam ily background to economic, cultural, and social conditions. The connection between text and context in Dorfman does not always seem critically ten able, nor necessarily enlightening; but neither can it be regarded as purely or principally mechanistic. In fact, it paves the way for a global considera tion where the individual is the "product" of a dialectical interplay between personal traits and impersonal, extra-subjective situations. The single most important contribution of Rick Tilman, as far as an overall interpretation of Veblen's thought and personality are concerned, consists in a critical reconsideration of Dorfman's study. Basing his views on archival sources, unpublished documents, and letters, especially on the correspondence of Veblen's elder brother, Andrew, the author maintains that "as urban Jew, he [Dorfman] could not fathom the rural culture of the Scandinavian settlements in the upper Midwest anymore than Norwe gian immigrants or first-generation Norwegian-Americans could understand urban Jewry" (p. 3). This might well be the case, with the following caveat: one does not have to be a member of the social group one analyzes. It is a reductio ad absurdum to claim that only blacks can study blacks, only Jews study Jews, and so forth.