BOOKS
219
The sporadic quality of Veblen's linguistic brilliance makes it im–
possible to stop at rhetorical analysis
if
we would find what is so com–
pelling in his work. What makes it difficult to go further is the intricate
relation between the professor who was a social theorist and the private
person who was a moral fabulist. In his public role, Veblen made his–
toric contributions. He pioneered in the task of converting modern an–
thropology into usable intellectual equipment for the social critic. Among
American social critics of major importance, he is unique in his indebted–
ness to Marx, and of American debtors to Marx he kept an exemplary
freedom from the fossilized doctrines which led others to partisan in–
fighting and meaningless wars of words. He was almost sixty, with
most of his major work behind him, when he was shaken from his
position as a detached theoretician living unto himself and caught in
the tide of liberals and socialists who saw in the chaos of the First
World War a hope for universal reconstruction of society thereafter. In
his famous rebuke to the younger Keynes for naive disenchantment with
the peace, he was in fact chiding himself for a rash commitment of
which the logical consequence was despair. In the postwar atmosphere
of counter-revolution, Veblen spoke up in wry praise of the Bolsheviks
and offered a bitter diagnosis of intervention in Russia and red-hunt
activity at home; he voiced a Middle Border brand of Bolshevism which
was, as Riesman points out, more a function of American Normalcy
than of Soviet dictatorship. The limitation and datedness of Veblen's
politics are all too apparent nowadays, but it takes a professional expert
to show us how the same defects less obviously exist in his economics,
his anthropology, his sociology, and his educational theory. Insofar as
Veblen was a worker in fact and not in fable, we have to know as
precisely as we can how far the development of social science has an–
tiquated him. Riesman's book reminds us that historic contributions may
be merely of historical interest, that "change has made much of Veblen
irrelevant, both where it followed his lead and incorporated his ideas
into our vocabulary and where it left him (to use one of his own
phrases) 'sitting on a dry shoal upstream.'''
Riesman does great service in showing us how much of Veblen we
must not swallow
if
we want to draw intellectual sustenance from his
work, but the unsympathetic critic, peeling away at the rind, may
tempt the uninitiated to throwaway the fruit. The argument of his
book is not quite as clear and judicious as its supremely systematized
form makes it appear. The virtues of his system are many. He gives a
psychological account, in some places staggering, of Veblen's personality,
and he does so without obscuring the questions to which psychology
