ABSTRACT
An excellent short bibliography appears in Max Lerner's The Portable Veblen (N. Y., Viking Press, 1950), pp. 630-632; Lerner's introduction to this volume is one of the best sympathetic statements on Veblen to be found, and his selection, like that of Wesley C. Mitchell in What Veblen Taught (N. Y., Viking Press, 1947), is a good place to begin the study of Veblen. Repeated reference has been made in the foregoing pages to Joseph Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America (N. Y., Viking Press, 1934), which contains not only the full, detailed, and authoritative account of Veblen's life and a digest of his writings (including a complete bibliography of them) but also an effort to place Veblen in his epoch and to relate him to currents of American thought. In "The 'Satire' of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class," Political Science Quarterly, XLVII (1932), pp. 363^09, Professor Dorfman ingeniously shows how greatly Veblen's evolutionary theory was influenced by Herbert Spencer's dichotomy between "military" and "industrial" societies, with Veblen turning the tables on Spencer by insisting on the military and feudal aspects of modern capitalism. (In the writings of W. J. Ghent, such as Our Benevolent Feudalism, Macmillan, 1902, a view similar to Veblen's is taken: Ghent saw the captains of industry as the new, if chastened, overlords.)
