Veblen possessed an unusual fascination for women; he engaged perpetually in affairs. After he made a trip to Europe with one of his lovers, he was forced out of his job, and his wife divorced him. He went to Stanford and then to the University of Missouri, remarried, and finally retired at the age of seventy. He chose to live alone in a small, western-style cabin, where he could meditate without distraction. There, aloof from society, he died.
Even though Veblen was a failure in his personal life, he established a national reputation in the academic world as the result of two major books and a series of essays. His first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), appeared when Veblen was forty-two. An overnight success, it is his most famous work, due primarily to the fact that readers took it to be a satire of aristocratic foibles. Actually, the book was much more, for Veblen refused to accept the assumptions underlying classical economic thought. While orthodox American economists accepted European teachings, Veblen dug to the root of the economy to discover the nature of his society.
The Theory of the Leisure Class examines the nature of economics and the meaning of leisure. While established economists explained human actions entirely by self-interest and competition, Veblen probed deeper. He doubted that self-interest held society together or that people preferred leisure over work.
Also, he discovered that there was no leisure class among American Indians, the Ainus of Japan, or Australia's bushmen. Everyone in these cultures worked — not for profit, but because of pride in workmanship and a common concern for their children's welfare.
His study of Polynesians, ancient Icelanders, and the shogunate system of feudal Japan revealed a different kind of society. A leisure class existed in each, but it was not an idle class. Instead, its members worked hard at seizing riches through force or cunning and didn't contribute to the actual production of wealth. What was significant was that they prevailed with the approval of their community.
