Veblen the Wobbly

Without comment - C. Wright Mills writes so well, any comment would be superfluous if not actually obscene.

“…it has been fashionable to sentimentalize veblen as the most alienated of american intellectuals...but veblen's virtue is not alienation; it is failure. modern intellectuals have made a success of alientation, but veblen was a natural born failure. to be conspicuously alienated was a kind of success he would have scorned most. in character and in career, in mind and in everyday life, he was the outsider, and his work the intellectual elaboration of a felt condition.

he was almost a foreigner, except if someone had told him, "if you don't like it here, go back where you came from" it would have to be wisconsin or minnesota. he was born in 1857 to norwegian immigrants in wisconsin and he was moved to minnesota by his father, an artisan-farmer...

.the next year he went to johns hopkins for graduate work and he took his phd at yale. no job was available for thorstein veblen. he went back to the farm. he married a girl from a family of university administrators. still no job. for six or seven years he lived in idle curiosity. the farm was no place for a scholar, although on the veblen farm scholarship was not out of place. in 1891, veblen went to cornell for further graduate work, and shorts thereafter finally got his first academic job at the university of chicago. he lived eccentrically, and his wife kept going away and coming back again. girls, we are told, liked veblen, and he did not really object. he was requested to resign. with his wife again, he got a job at stanford, where the chicago story was more or less repeated. his wife now gone for good, veblen began to teach at the university of missouri, where he wrote four of his five best books while living in the cellar of a colleague's house. after world war I, he lectured at the future haven for refugee scholars, the new school. he was not a successful lecturer. then he went to stanford and lived in a shack in the nearby woods, where he died alone on august 3, 1929.

there is no failure in american academic history quite as great as veblen's. he was a masterless, recalcitrant man, and if we must group him somewhere in the american scene, it is with those most recalcitrant americans, the wobblies. on the edges of higher learning, veblen tried to live like a wobbly. it was a strange place for such an attempt. the wobblies were not learned, but they were, like veblen, masterless men, and the only non-middle class movement of revolt in twentieth-century america. with his accute discontent and shyness of program, veblen was a sort of intellectual wobbly.” (Mills, "Thorstein Veblen", 1953)

From:

C. Wright Mills, _The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills_ Selected and Introduced by John H. Summers (Oxford University Press, 2008)

An excellent collection of mostly previously unpublished essays - some as "drafts" for _The Sociological Imagination_. With a very insightful introduction by John H. Summers.