ABSTRACT
Thorstein Veblen began his teaching career at the newly-founded University of Chicago in 1892, when he was already thirty-five. It was at Chicago that Veblen had the most sympathetic and stimulating colleagues and where most of his best work was done. Veblen responded to the ideas of his colleagues, but not to their reform activities. Much of his work may be seen as a passionate defense of women; Veblen regarded women as the great oppressed cadre. Veblen managed in his best moments to use a verbal complexity almost as remarkable as Conrad's to create living abstractions out of the very perils and frustrations of his own concrete existence. Almost any passage of Veblen is instantly recognizable- a final ironical tribute to a man who believed, not in distinction of persons, but in a "commonwealth of ungraded men".
