About this audiobook
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist whose work situates economic behavior within broader social and cultural processes at the close of the nineteenth century. Raised in a Norwegian immigrant family in the Upper Midwest, he pursued formal study in the United States and Europe, developing a multidisciplinary approach that fused economics, history, and anthropology. The Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in English in 1899 by Macmillan, emerges from this intellectual milieu at the cusp of the Gilded Age and the early industrial modernity defining American life. Composed amid debates about poverty, inequality, and the social functions of wealth, the book embodies a historical-sociological impulse: to trace the origins and institutional maintenance of a nonindustrial elite whose prerogatives certify rank as a social end in itself rather than as a necessity of production. It reflects the period’s intensifying interest in reform, the rise of social science disciplines, and a critical, evolutionary-narrative method that seeks to illuminate the moral and economic meanings of conspicuous display within capitalist society.
