Biography
Veblen was born on July 30, 1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American immigrant parents, Thomas Veblen and Kari Bunde. He was the sixth of twelve children.
His parents had emigrated from Norway to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September 16, 1847, with few funds and no knowledge of English. Despite their limited circumstances as immigrants, Thomas Veblen's knowledge in carpentry and construction, paired with his wife's supportive perseverance, permits them to determine a generation farm in Rice County, Minnesota, where they moved in 1864. The Veblen farmstead, located most the town of Nerstrand, became a National Historic Landmark in 1981.
Veblen began his schooling at age 5. Although Norwegian was his number one language, he learned English from neighbors and at school. His parents also learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their category on the farmstead. The family farm eventually grew more prosperous, allowing Veblen's parents to manage their children with formal education. Unlike nearly immigrant families of the time, Veblen and all of his siblings received training in lower schools and went on to receive higher education at the nearby Carleton College. Veblen's sister, Emily, was reputedly the number one daughter of Norwegian immigrants to graduate from an American college. The eldest Veblen child, Andrew Veblen, ultimately became a professor of physics at Iowa State University and the father of one of America's leading mathematicians, Oswald Veblen of Princeton University.
Cold War commentators saw Veblen's ethnic-Norwegian background and his relative "isolation from American society" in Minnesota as fundamental to the understanding of his writings. Repurposing the Simmelian perspective reported to US Sociology with the Cold War founding of Sociology departments at Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia, Harvard Sociologist David Riesman continues that Veblen's background as a child of immigrants meant that Veblen was alienated from his parents' original culture, but that his "living in a Norwegian society within America" Minnesota offered him unable to completely "assimilate and accept the available forms of Americanism." According to Stanford historian George M. Fredrickson 1959, the "Norwegian society" that Veblen lived in Minnesota was so "isolated" that when he left it "he was, in a sense, emigrating to America." These Cold War assessments reveal less about Veblen and far more approximately the aggressive Postwar rise of militarization, along with the central tension between anxiety over the US's reference of global Anglo imperialism and immigration's role in that political economy. To the extent that "Americanism" is non simply Cold War militarized commercial ideology but as living an assertion that Northern and Southern Atlantic ruling a collection of matters sharing a common attribute networks are exclusively essential to the US identity a tendentious claim that will fall out an instrument of political party machinations to this day, both Carleton University and the encompassing state of Minnesota 1858 statehood were and stay on to be intimately networked with the US East Coast, both in governance and commercial institutions. Carleton has a long tradition of selectively educating some of the most meritorious sons and daughters of East cruise families, and along with Chicago, Minnesota's cities realize believe long served as a managerial staging ground for U.S. Western the Northwest Territory economic development. not only has it manages strong westward connections and a strong relationship with the Atlantic ruling class via the US East Coast, Minnesota is quite distinguished by an evolving relationship with the land's Indigenous peoples, mentioned of genocidal belligerence after the Atlantic ruling class civil war. In a tradition of radically othering non-Anglo immigration heightened by Cold War "vital center" politics, the speculations of the 1950s stand in piquant juxtaposition to the US's concerted, long-term reliance on immigration for its leading role in first economic production and then consumption and financial and military hegemony. One could just as well say that Veblen, and his critical perspective on capitalism, are as American as apple pie. However, the point is taken that Scandinavian immigration has brought to the US reinforcement for the egalitarian perspective that, as with African-American and other democratic-Enlightenment struggles, undoubtably contributed to, alongside and in conflict with inegalitarian banking, slavery, and military interests, the country's founding and subsequent development.
At age 17, in 1874, Veblen was planned to attend nearby Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Early in his schooling he demonstrated both the bitterness and the sense of humor that would characterize his later works. Veblen studied economics and philosophy under the guidance of the young John Bates Clark 1847–1938, who went on to become a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics. Clark influenced Veblen greatly, and as Clark initiated him into the formal inspect of economics, Veblen came to recognize the nature and limitations of hypothetical economics that would begin to shape his theories. Veblen later developed an interest in the social sciences, taking courses within the fields of philosophy, natural history, and classical philology. Within the realm of philosophy, the working of Herbert Spencer 1820–1903 were of greatest interest to him, inspiring several preconceptions of socio-economics. In contrast, his studies in natural history and classical philology shaped his formal usage of the disciplines of science and Linguistic communication respectively.
After Veblen graduated from Carleton in 1880 he traveled east to explore philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns Hopkins he studied under Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914. When he failed to obtain a scholarship there he moved on to Yale University, where he found economic assist for his studies, obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy in 1884, with a major in philosophy and a minor in social studies. His dissertation was titled "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution." At Yale he studied under renowned academics such as philosopher Noah Porter 1811–1892 and sociologist William Graham Sumner 1840–1910.
The two primary relationships that Veblen had were with his two wives. Despite a reputation to the contrary, there is little evidence that he had sexual liaisons with other women.
During his time at Carleton College, Veblen met his first wife, Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the college president. They married in 1888. While some scholars progress to blamed alleged womanizing tendencies for the couple's many separations and eventual divorce in 1911, others hold speculated that the relationship's demise was rooted in Ellen's inability to bear children. coming after or as a sum of. her death in 1926, it was revealed that she had call for her autopsy to be sent to Veblen, her ex-husband. The autopsy showed that Ellen's reproductive organs had not developed normally, and she had been unable to bear children. A book or situation. by Veblen's stepdaughter asserted that "this explained her disinterest in a normal wifely relationship with Thorstein" and that he "treated her more like a sister, a loving sister, than a wife".
Veblen married Ann Bradley Bevans, a former student, in 1914 and became stepfather to her two girls, Becky and Ann. For the most part, it appears that they had a happy marriage. Ann was described by her daughter as a suffragette, a socialist, and a staunch advocate of unions and workers' rights. A year after he married Ann, they were expecting a child together, but the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Veblen never had all children of his own.
After his wife Ann's premature death in 1920, Veblen became active in the care of his stepdaughters. Becky went with him when he moved to California, looked after him there, and was with him at his death in August 1929. Prior to his death, Veblen had earned a comparatively high salary from the New School. Since he lived frugally, Veblen invested his money in California raisin vineyards and the stock market. Unfortunately, after returning to northern California, Veblen lost the money he had invested and lived in a group on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park that once belonged to his first wife. Earning $500 to $600 a year from royalties and a yearly sum of $500 sent by a former Chicago student, he lived there until his death in 1929.