VEBLEN, Thorstein.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. First edition of Veblen's final and most caustic work, predicting the decline of American democracy as capital came increasingly under the control of remote financiers."It was his most somber work, his final indictment against a business civilization about to receive its coronation under the Calvin Coolidge administration. Here Veblen first expressed explicitly what had been at the back of his mind for two decades, namely that the engineering class was too integrated into the business system to constitute a negation of it, and that the underlying populations would continue to put up with the 'imbecilic institutions' of capitalism because they had absorbed its cultural ethic of individualism and materialism. In chapter after chapter Veblen unfolds a grim story of the expansion and control of the 'money power', of the conspiracies of trade and the imposition of advertising costs upon the consumer, of the plight of the independent farmer too self-reliant to organize against organized capital, of the centralization of corporate power, and of the wasteful exploitation and growing exhaustion of America's natural resources by absentee owners" (Diggins, pp. 24-25).

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