ABSTRACT
Veblen, however, never explained why some economists, himself included, were historically minded and literate in spite of being ”younger.” To be sure, all this needs to be qualified by recalling once again that Veblen kept a kind of ikon corner for the impractical and the “un-American,” the inefficient, the unbusinesslike, and the irrelevant, in the form of his concept of “idle curiosity.” A genealogy of the Veblen family indicates that most of Thorstein’s siblings marriea other Norwegian-Americans and apparendy remained in rural areas; one brother, and his favorite nephew Oswald, entered academic life. The state of the art allowed him not to be cabined by his chosen discipline; and his eloquent pleas for opening it up to new areas of investigation—business practice, anthropology, psychology, as well as politics—have helped create such cadres of no longer quite marginal but also not wholly free men and women as the economic historians of today.
