Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
Social Critic ◽  
Leisure Class ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
The University

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist, sociologist and social critic. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1884. After a six-year stint on his family’s farm, he found employment at the University of Chicago, where he remained for fourteen years. He is best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), his penetrating and idiosyncratic analysis of the upper middle class.

Veblen's Social Satire and Amos Alonzo Stagg: Football and the American Way of Life

Prospects ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 273-289
Author(s):  
Hugh J. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Leisure Class ◽  
Academic Policy ◽  
American Way ◽  
The University ◽  
American Academic

Since the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen's unhappy experience at the University of Chicago has been recognized as the precipitant of its criticism of American academic life. The endeavors of John D. Rockefeller, the University's founder; William Rainey Harper, its first president; and benefactors like Charles Tyson Yerkes exemplified what Veblen denounced as “the conduct of universities by business men.” Almost two decades intervened between The Leisure Class and the fuller indictment of The Higher Learning in America, which drew also upon Veblen's disappointments at Stanford, where he taught after his dismissal from Chicago. The later book developed a manuscript critique of higher education that Veblen had written in 1904. Although he professed to feel bound “under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum” to observe a “large reticence” in speaking of the University's president, his 1916 preface mocked Harper as the “Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy.” The book's criticisms “necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago” and were largely directed at the zeal for moral regeneration that Harper would have had suffuse his campus.

How Liberal Protestant Church Historians Helped Turn “Christianity” into a Good White Protestant American Religion in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-398
Author(s):  
Robert A. Orsi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Shirley Jackson ◽  
Union Theological Seminary ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
The University

From the three historians of early Christianity whose lives and careers Elizabeth Clark discusses in The Fathers Refounded—Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case from the University of Chicago Divinity School—there breathes a palpable air of white, upper-middle-class liberal Protestant complacency and intellectual superiority. Modernists all, they know they are on the winning side of truth because they are confident that they are on the winning side of time. Summarizing McGiffert's distinction between ancient and contemporary Christianity, Clark writes: “Only in modernity, when God's immanence was championed, was the dualism between human and divine in Christ overcome.” “Christ, if he was human,” McGiffert believed, “must be divine, as all men are.” McGiffert's historiography shimmers with Emersonian confidence and ebullience. In his assumption—his assertion—of “only in,” we hear the ringing sound of modernity's triumphant temporality.

Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920. By Thomas Winter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. vii, 208. $40.00, cloth; $17.00, paper.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-280
Author(s):  
John Enyeart
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Class Difference ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
The University ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

To comprehend how republican Victorians in the Gilded Age became liberal moderns in the Progressive Era we must grasp the tensions between gender and class in shaping identity. Thomas Winter in Making Men, Making Class aids in our understanding of this fundamental shift by providing a study of the middle-class men who ran the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). YMCA secretaries, Winter argues, attempted “to transcend class lines and unite men on the basis of manhood [which] ultimately led them to articulate new definitions of manhood structured by class difference” (p. 7). Making Men is the story of YMCA leaders' desire to quell working-class radicalism by promoting an idea of manhood rooted in hard work, loyalty to employers, and Christian fellowship.

Book Review: C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-class Caste

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-292
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-class Caste, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014, 278 pp.

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