Last Years
In 1914 Veblen published The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of Industrial Arts (Veblen 1914) - which he declared to be his most important work because it delivered the psychological and anthropological foundations of his approach in the most complete way (see also Hodgson 2004: 143) - and, in the following year, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Veblen 1915).
The capacity of a developing nation (as Germany was at that time) to attain and develop the most advanced technology was presented as a significant advantage. In contrast to England, Germany had imported the most advanced technology, creating conditions whereby its development would not be hampered by old institutions, as is typical of a more mature economy. Veblen’s views were considered supportive of German interests. According to US espionage legislation, he was denied the possibility to sell his book by mail order. Moreover, because his political position was considered un-American, he was no longer allowed to teach at Cornell University. In 1917 his new work - An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation - predicted the birth of a new world order and proposed conditions for a long-lasting peace.In 1918, he began an editorial collaboration with The Dial, a literary and political magazine advocating internationalism and the refoundation of industrial and scholastic systems. His reflections about this period, originally appearing in The Dial, were subsequently published as The Vested Interest and the State of Industrial Arts (Veblen 1919b). The Dial editorial staff debated subjects ranging from the Soviet organization, the Treaty of Versailles and the conditions of war reparations at the end of the First World War. At this time, Veblen dedicated himself to political matters and wrote, for example, “Bolshevism is a menace - to whom?” (Veblen 1919a).
In 1919, he ended his partnership with The Dial, owing to the review’s financial and political problems, and joined the New School for Social Research of New York. Because of cutbacks in research projects, the best among his colleagues, including Wesley Clair Mitchell and Charles Austin Beard, resigned. Veblen had no alternative but to remain. In 1920, the year his wife Anne died, he wrote a review of John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), in which he affirmed that the conditions imposed by the hegemonic powers were subtended to the destruction of Soviet Russia.From that time on, he continued to focus on technocratic systems and published The Engineers and Price System (Veblen 1921) - one of his most controversial and quasiutopian works, which combined two previous articles published in The Dial. The book imagined a technocratic system organized by a Soviet of Technicians, who could oversee production processes and eliminate the waste of resources with the aid and efficient expertise of engineers. This was, in his eyes, the opposite of an industrial system based on the interests of absentee ownership.
Veblen left his economic and sociological studies in 1926 and moved to Palo Alto, California, where he died on 3 August 1929 of a heart attack.
Alfonso Giuliani
See also:
Institutionalism (II); Non-Marxian socialist ideas in Britain and the United States (II).