ABSTRACT
Periodically, there is a renewed wave of interest in Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System. The Engineers and the Pnce System is squarely in the center of the preoccupation that has attended the rise of sociology since its beginnings in the nineteenth century: namely, the scanning of the historical skies for portents of “the new class” which will overturn the existing social order. The movement that Veblen thought was a “class-conscious effort” by engineers to end the “all-pervading mismanagement of industry” was, in its most immediate organizational thrust, an attempt to give engineers a distinct “professional” status in society. In its extremely vague import, it was a chimerical “technocratic eudaemonism." Falling back on the “instinct of workmanship” as the basic virtue, Veblen the technocrat longed for the restoration of “the most ancient.”.
