Response to Veblem's "The Theory of the Leisure Class"

Despite the density of Veblem's turn-of-the-century language in his "The Theory of the Leisure Class," his work sheds necessarily objective light on the practices, ideologies, and characteristics of the upper class much in the same way Jacob Riis did for the ways of the lower class in "How the Other Half Lives".  With an expository style, much of Veblem's writing focuses on the upper classes relation to labor and consumption.  In doing so, I thought that Veblem exposes one of the great ironies of the upper class: they have earned the most money and yet accomplish the least.  As we have discussed, much of the money these members of the upper class had was passed down through generations, and hence there was no need for them to work.  Regardless however, money is finite, and the "conspicuous" spending that forms the crux of upper class activities undoubtedly eats into these funds significantly.

This often inexplicable phenomenon lies at the heart of Veblem's work, and in his exegesis he illuminates how the appearance of the ability to do nothing, that is, to have someone else do all of the work instead, dominated upper class ideologies.  Furthermore, within the hegemony of wealth there were a number of sub-stratas, characterized by the number of servants one had and the triviality of tasks that could be avoided through the help of servants.  This is of course, where Veblem comes to define the term "Conspicuous Leisure": as much as wealth was (and often still is) a performance for the upper class, more often than not this performance involved doing literally nothing or as little as possible.