Thorstein Veblen - Biography

Biography

Veblen was born in Cato, Wisconsin, of Norwegian American parents who had immigrated from Norway. He spent the majority of his youth on his family farm in Nerstrand, Minnesota; the farmstead is now a National Historic Landmark. Although Norwegian was his first language, he learned English from both neighbors and at school, which he began at the age of 5. His family was highly successful and placed great emphasis on education and hard work, all of which undoubtedly contributed to his later scorn for what he termed “conspicuous consumption” and waste of the Gilded Age. These settlements were little Norways, oriented around the religious and cultural traditions of the old country . He broke away by attending a Yankee school, Carleton College Academy (now Carleton College) in Northfield, Minnesota; he was lucky to study with young John Bates Clark (1847–1938), who later became the nation's foremost economist and was a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics.

Veblen did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of the pragmatist school in philosophy; he took his Ph.D. in 1884 at Yale University with a dissertation on "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution." He was a student of philosopher Noah Porter (1811–1892) and economist/sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910). Perhaps the most important intellectual influences on Veblen were Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whose work in the last half of the 19th century sparked an enormous interest in the evolutionary perspective on human societies. In 1891 he became a fellow at Cornell University.

Veblen married fellow Cornellian Ellen Rolfe in 1888; it was a very unhappy marriage that finally ended in divorce in 1911. He married Ann Bradley in 1914 and became stepfather to her two girls, Becky and Ann. After his wife's death in 1920, Veblen became very active in the care of the girls. Becky went with him when he moved to California, looked after him there, and was with him at his death in 1929.