Born July 30, 1857, in Manitowok county, Wisconsin; died Aug. 3, 1929, near Menlo Park, California. American economist and sociologist. Professor of economics at Chicago, Stanford, and Missouri universities.

Veblen’s views are contradictory and combine petit-bourgeois utopianism with a critique of certain sides of capitalism. Under the influence of Marx, Veblen considered the basis of social life to be material production. However, having a simplistic understanding of the connection between technology and sociocultural institutions and undervaluing the importance of forms of property, he equated social production only with technology. According to Veblen, the traditions and views of people lag behind changes in the technology of production; the evolution of society is equated basically with the process of the mental adaptation of individuals to these changes.

Considering any society as a productive machine whose component parts are economic institutions, Veblen represented history as the result of a struggle between two basic classes: the businessmen, who are concerned with the sphere of circulation, and the industrialists, who organize material production. Veblen felt the first group to be reactionary. Business, according to Veblen, gives rise to private property, nationalism, and religious ignorance. In some of his works, Veblen proposed to transfer the leadership of the economy and of the entire society to the industrial-technical intelligentsia, to create a “general staff of engineers and technicians who, by exercising political power, could develop production in the interests of society. However, at the end of his life Veblen renounced many of these Utopian ideas, which later were used in technocratic theories. Veblen’s views, especially his theory of the leisure class, the idea of the lag of culture behind technology, and the criticism of certain aspects of American life, exerted an important influence on the development of American non-Marxist sociology.