ABSTRACT
As Thorstein Veblen aged, his belief that business was a parasitic growth on industry became more and more an obsessive theme with variations, such as the one linking politicians with businessmen in a conspiracy against the full use of the industrial arts. Veblen fell for a Populist and still popular stereotype, too, in supposing that lawyers were invariably wordy, abstract fellows, given to chicane in aid of business sabotage. The system of business enterprise is the usufruct of a much briefer history- its pedigree hardly goes back further than 18th-century mercantilism, though it draws on animistic attitudes towards nature, and predatory attitudes towards man, which are of course much older. A major portion of Veblen's work may be seen as the effort to show the variety of ways in which a pecuniary culture sacrifices the industrial arts of production to the invidious ones of consumption.
