ABSTRACT
The 'curious reversal' to traditional academic wear, Thorstein Veblen explains, coincides with the culmination of a whole series of backward-looking trends in America whose origins he identifies with the Civil War. The implication presents in the discussion of language and style which brings The Theory of the Leisure Class to a close, one is that the book is hardly the work of a linguistically naive, innocent social scientist. In his later books, The Theory of Business Enterprise and The Instinct of Workmanship, Veblen goes on developing such criticisms. William Dean Howells, for example, thought very highly of the book, and wrote two successive leading articles in Literature in praise of it. Lester Ward, the leading American sociologist of the day, also wrote admiringly of the book, but he tended to regard it as no more than a discussion of the way of life of an American aristocracy. However, Veblen agrees that there have been changes within the post-bellum period.
