ABSTRACT
America, which has produced the most finished and tenacious brand of business civilization, has also produced the most finished and tenacious criticism of it. That is the core meaning of Thorstein Veblen's work. It was a body of work bounded on both sides by the image of economic power. Veblen began his formative thinking in the 1880's, when trusts were emerging and the new "dynastic corporation" was planting itself squarely in the path of the traditional political ideals. His first published economic essay appeared in 1892, two years after the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. His last writing was done in the 1920's during the boom period of what was being called the "New Capitalism," when the monopolies came into their present power. Among all the thinkers who sought to analyze the nature and consequences of this new business imperium of the West, vaster than any comparable imperium that history had produced, Veblen is easily the towering figure. His critique of our civilization is as unsparing as the Marxian, and at the same time more subtle because it is an analysis in depth, with a psychology, an anthropology, and a theory of civilizations.
