ABSTRACT
Veblen understood that both the language and the ideological context that serve to legitimate capitalism are rooted in rights discourse. The language of rights is a contextual feature of our phenomenal world, that is, the world as we experience it before reflecting upon it. It is in this sense that rights are a “discourse.” The “world-as-we-experience-it” is what Veblen means by “habits of thought and life.” Veblen states that the “right of ownership” results phenomenologically from the “masterless men” of the feudal era (the urban craftsmen), whereby what they produced with their own hands should be theirs “by right.” Veblen suggests that “twentieth-century technology has outgrown the eighteenth-century system of vested rights.”
