Andrew's Wiki
Theory Leisure Class

Leisure

• History of theorizing leisure
  • Veblen
    • Leisure not as idleness, but rather a class devoted to the governing, religious, and warrior vocations
    • Vicarious leisure itself involves skills that are unproductive, that is, do not generate income
  • Modern sociology
    • Leisure as a mass activity that reveals cultural trends

Method

• Outlined in preface
  • Proven by examples from everyday life, not “recondite” academic works
  • Studies parts of social life not typically examined by economics
  • Understands role of interpretation
    • “The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed changes…apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and values them for a different purposes” (9)
• Avoids moral moral judgment
  • 265: “impossible to avoid any apparent implication of disapproval” but he don’t mean it, folks
    • 266: only, some institutions “handed down from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might be”
  • 394: at worst, he calls them “disserviceable anachronisms”
• Darwin
  • 188: “The man in society, just like the life of other species, is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective adaptation.”
    • for the “fittest habits of thought”
    • institutions are changed as structure of community changes (ie its way of life, essentially its mode of production) but they also change people in turn: it’s mutual adaptation
  • 207: asserts evolutionary standpoint is “morally colorless”
  • 192: Social adaptation primarily “mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past”
  • 218: evolutionary concepts of Darwin and Spencer “not indispensible”
  • Denies at different places to what degree he means races and if you can use his system as race classification (quick to say that his adaptation stuff happens within any society), doesn’t say whether adaptation means selection or adaptation
  • 239: Two kinds of selection going on, the industrial and the pecuniary: this is an economic rather than biological type of evolution (less about heredity and more about temperament that can either be inherited or developed, nature or nurture it doesn’t matter which
• Marxism?
  • Yes
    • 136: General Marxist etiology
      • Accounts for changes among generations to be “changing economic situation”
    • 193: Says the the factors encouraging change in social institutions are “in the last analysis, almost entirely of an economic nature” in a “modern industrial community”
      • “Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism, the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the life process of the community in contact with the material environment in which it lives.”
      • 195: Social change spurred by readjustments made to adapt chiefly to new economic circumstances (I like how this gives a new look at the engine of historical change, a slightly diff look at Marx’s historical teleology, one that could take the apocalypse out of Marx and thus make him more tenable!)
    • 266: Persistence of speaking only from economic point of view: not aesthetic, moral, or anything else
      • 306: becomes defensive about it
    • Copies dialectic of bourgeois capital the product of Leisure Class itself will be the downfall of L C
      • 390: About growth of education and New Woman movements, “favors the growth of a non-invidious attitude, which may, in the long run, prove a menace to the stability of the institution itself, and even to the institution of individual ownership on which it rests.”
    • Wants collective system of culture based on industry: collective fit is natural fit for industry, thinks Veblen
  • No
    • 294: not completely determinist; does see some room for “extra-economic standards of value” which he calls “weightier interests” (although one could argue Veblen is being defensive here, just throwing people a bone so he doesn’t get fired, chewed out)
    • Different account of the specific type of evil capitalism is
      • Assumes base self-intent to be a transhistorical motive way preceding capitalism
      • Sees non-invidious behavior as more helpful for industry
    • Not interested in changing the system but only if finding out if economic systems match social institutions
      • Thinks that the problem to solve is the mismatch between the institutions founded on barbarian culture and the industrial economy today
      • Doesn’t blame anything on capitalism itself: if anything, it’s not capitalist enough
• Definition of culture
  • A combination of the society’s way of life (its means of survival) along with its institutions (“special methods of life and of human relations” that “shape the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitudes” (188) in a Darwinian process of selection and adaptation
  • A culture has a “general theory of life” (190) which is the sum of its institutions, which in essence are habits of thoughts that are themselves responses to circumstances (stimuli)
  • Culture essentially conservative, if not regressive: institutions are a little bit outdated, technically “wrong” for its time
    • Institutions rely on habits, which are difficult to change because people avoid having to make the intellectual effort of change
    • Social change happens when a society’s institutions struggle to catch up with the present circumstances
    • Ex: Modern culture is not based on a quasi-peaceable basis, but it tries to revert to its culture of “status” (mastery/subservience) with, for example, imperialism

Conspicuous Fields

• Conspicuous Consumption
• Conspicuous Leisure
• Conspicuous Waste
• Conspicuous Decency (205) (as opposed to giving comfort)
• Conspicuous Hoarding (205) (as absorbing all surplus)

Typology

• Acquisition versus Production Institutions
  • Job
    • A: Pecuniary (ownership and accumulation)
    • P: Industrial (production and workmanship)
  • Nature of that Job
    • A: Invidious (Parasitic)
    • P: Non-invidious
  • Who
    • A: Leisure Class and Captains of Industry
    • P: Others
  • Motivation
    • A: Exploitation
    • P: Serviceability
  • True Era
    • A: Predation (Fraud)
    • P: Peaceable
  • Acquisition institutions guide social institutions, but they come from the past sytem and are ill-fitting.
    • Their jobs: finance, mercantile, administrative, law, gov, military, ecclesiastic, academic
  • This distinction doesn’t map perfectly in individual persons or classes because of archaic survivals (ie some L C might be religious and thus give lots to charity), because of emulation (everyone wants to be like L C)
• Basic Qualities of L C
  • Shuns labor, which as a sign of poverty is dishonorable
• 1. Savage
  • Initial phase of social development
  • Struggle against non-human environment
  • Peaceable
  • Animism (but non-coercive)
  • Good for community
• 2. Barbarian
  • War
  • Anthropomorphic, coercive cults
  • Struggle against human environment
  • Predatory
  • Social antagonism
  • Prowess
  • The model used by the leisure class
• 3. Quasi-peaceable
  • Still social antagonism
  • Shrewd/astuteness
  • Emulatory/status
  • Slaves
  • The golden age of leisure class: feudal order
• 4. Peaceful
  • Modern
  • Fraud/force/prudence
  • Private property
  • Outgrowing status
  • No real place for master/servant
  • Wage labor
  • Leisure class is out of date: savage values better fit industry

History of the Leisure Class

• Develops alongside increasing division of labor
  • Women were the first industrial jobs, which let men take the honorific jobs (5)
• Usually shows up at transition between savage (peaceable) to barbarian (warlike) culture when there’s a pretty reliable food supply (thus needs certain amount of technical skill to free up time for some people to have leisure)
  • True mode of production for L C is therefore seizure (not industry, but instead a show of force)
    • Their labor is predatory rather than productive
• Truly begins with introduction of ownership
  • Does not mean “habitual neglect of work” (22)
  • “neither does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership” but only when ownership becomes “conventional,” that is has a host of conventional associations that give repute
• Highest level of L C: feudal society
• Nowadays, “do not entirely fit the situation of today….not as apt as might be” 209, for they are “parasitic”
  • They live “by the community, not in it”
  • They are survivals, archaic : “a survival from am ore or less remote past phase…the hereditary present” 215
  • Exemption from industrial production: they only take work that aligns with their “spiritual attitude” of disgust for menial work
• Conservatism
  • They in essence stop time, keep on harking back to the past form of predatory culture
  • They are not forced to adjust to industrial production, so they revert to the natural human instinct of laziness: of not changing b/c of the difficult mental effort to change (only people who HAVE TO change, will make the effort to do so)
• Survivals of Prowess Today
  • Patriotism
  • War
  • Boy-fighting
  • Duels
  • Gambling: you and your animistic sense of luck (luck is animistic b/c it’s a force that occupies something, that you want to control but don’t nkow how to; luck disturbs the normal course of things, so it’s an anti-causal/anti-scientific view of world)
  • Hunting
  • Sport
  • Some have all of these remaining, like I would say Barry Lyndon: “those who fail [to mature] remain as an indissolved residue of crude humanity in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial efficiency and the fulness of life of the collectivity…arrested spiritual development” (254)

Stuff

• Definition of Industry
  • “utilisation of non-human things”
  • “power over nature” rather than other people 10
  • making new objects out of passive material 12
    • whereas exploit is directed against some other agent (a force) to steal that agent’s energies
• Workmanship
  • 15-6: “sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity”
    • Strange causal chain: in societies given to invidious comparison, success is seen as the result of workmanship and therefore honorable, but gradually the success itself seems honorable in and of itself, and the trait of workmanship gets kicked out: “visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility as a basis of esteem”
  • 93: antagonist to conspicuous waste, for the instinct of workmanship always comes out on top unless you are in a culture of invidious comparison
    • This instinct is “present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances”
      • Although often just means people feel like they have to give an excuse for their conspicuous waste that makes it look like efficiency
    • Survival of workmanship in societies that generally deprecate it: “an abiding sense of the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futile” that usually only touches the most “obvious and apparent violations:” you can appreciate these obvious violations “only upon reflection”
      • Seems to me that it explains dandy

Conspicuous Consumption

• Def: accumulation of goods less for consumption itself than for emulation (that is, invidious comparison in which a great display of money confers honor)
  • Thus disagrees with classic political economy b/c they say ownership is necessary for survival
    • Even poorer classes, he points out, have some room for emulation
• Historical Changes
  • Initially, accumulation confers honor upon your whole community, but over time becomes centered around the individual
  • Historically, accumulation of property replaces the seizure of spoils via predation and exploit: money replaces trophies (stolen wives, gold, heads, game)
    • How is it still predation? It’s industrial aggression: still ultimately about a belief in your physical force
  • Property at first is ocular evidence (as Iago might say) of your success, but over time the money itself is seen as the honorable thing (rather than the successful exploit that resulted IN money): money in itself becomes honorable
    • This is a story common to Veblen: something is a sign of something ELSE which is desired, but then that something is seen as an end in itself, eliding the original historical meaning
      • The symbol gains intrinsic worth: in itself it is “substantially right” (62): wealth (29), manners (originally a “pantomime” to demonstrate your mastery or subservience as people of the vicarious leisure class, VCL 47), consumption (69), conservatism (200)
    • Eventually, inherited money is seen as even better b/c you have an even further connection from vulgar effort

Emulation

• The strongest economic motive after pure survival
• Def: need to compare favorably with the average wealth in your class, “more creditable showing of accumulated wealth”
  • In other words, invidious comparison, “excel everyone else” 32
• Never Satiated
  • Because it it relative (ie compared to someone else) you can never achieve it once and for all
  • Always have to be climbing classes, and each time a new standard is created that you must surpass, which lands you in another class and the cycle starts anew
• In Lower Class
  • Because the standard of living is lower, it is often reduced to being industrious: having this quality is seen as honorable
  • We can be cynical about it: their need for decency—that is at least to keep up with the standard and not fall below—makes them work harder

Conspicuous Leisure

• Definition: “non-productive consumption of time” because work is dishonorable and because leisure proves your wealth
• Purpose: Getting status from wealth requires proving it, and C L will do that
  • Leisure “beautiful and ennobling” as evidence of your superiority 38
• “Tabu” on labor
  • Mentions the decayed gentle classes that refuse to stoop to labor 42
• “Does not commonly leave a material product” (45)
  • Whereas productive labor: “the lasting evidence of productive labor is its material product” 44
  • Veblen wants to refer here to “leisure in the narrower sense,” which doesn’t count “any ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no intrinsic use” which takes out much of woman’s work: Hmmm what do I make of that?
• Examples of “real” leisure (ie immaterial leisure) that are “serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time” 45
  • “Quasi-scholarly and quasi-artistic accomplishments”
  • “knowledge of processes and incidents which do no conduce directly to the furtherance of human life”
  • “knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences,
  • “of correct spelling;
  • “of syntax and prosody;
  • “of the various forms of domestic music and other household art;
  • “of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture, and equipage;
  • “of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses” (45)
  • Manners, decorum, good breeding; good carriage (of one’s body); ceremonial observances (46) all of which require extensive training (ie evidence of CL)
• The Fashion
  • These matters are all highly fashionable; that is, they change constantly
  • Why? It makes it even more “a substantial and patent waste of time” 51 to keep up with all the latest vogues

Has Good Stuff About…

• Definition of Waste (must not contribute to physical well-being but does contribute to spiritual well-being b/c contributes to your repute; must be more costly than utility necessitates; cannot be as perfect as machine-quality goods, with Kelmscott press books as his biggest example which are cumbersome and hard to read)
• Religion (as wasteful, clergy as a leisure class)
  • Religion is archaic and hinders adjustment to industrial world b/c it requires “matter-of-fact mechanics”
  • Holidays as “compulsory leisure” where you are a VLC (vicarious leisure class) for the god
  • Notes that the people who have the most direct contact with industrial production (the male working class) are the ones least likely to accept religion, which is outdated (doesn’t match the scientific pattern of causality that industrial production requires)
• Definitions of serviceability, beauty, decency, Truth, duty, morals are all wrapped up in questions of pecuniary value
  • Taste, for example, entirely contingent, not really connected to actual aesthetic beauty (ie we see truly ugly clothes as pretty)
• Non-Invidious
  • Charity
  • Sociability
  • Temperance organizations, sewing circles, YMCA, peace organizations, art clubs
  • Although even when you try to be non-invidious it often works against you: the donor gets Good Moral Feeling but the religious structures of emulatory culture often get in the way, making it all about the repute of the volunteer
  • Suggests that we’ll see more and more of these b/c invidious culture doesn’t match reality of industrial production
• Higher Education
  • We’re lackeys of the leisure class, a more modern form of religious duties, with our rites of succession and special garments
  • Humanities = waste b/c knowledge “for its own sake” is lack of practical application
• Dress: best example of pecuniary taste b/c easily accessible: everyone sees it
  • It’s not about having the most expensive stuff outright: instead, expensiveness is coded as “decency” or “good taste”
  • Clothes that show you aren’t part of industrial production: shiny glossy materials, restrictive clothes that disable you for any work (corsets, skirts, ridiculous hats; scrupulous cleanliness)
  • Dress must be both CW (fashionableness, always changing) and CL (show that you don’t work)
  • Fashion: also about relief from today’s ugliness: if clothes were about beauty, we’d have found one stable model of clothes and have stuck w/it, but it’s about fashion: about pure expense AND about the fact that we abhor waste and excess in our instinct for workmanship (so we constantly evolve new clothes to avoid yesterday’s hideous outfit, but doing so we only create tomorrow’s also hideous but in a different way outfit)
  • What we do, epitomized by Humanities, is wasteful
  • The influx of technical and agricultural sciences show that the pattern is now changing
• Conservatism: modernity characterized by “arrested spiritual development”
  • The LC can be conservative b/c not connected to the Latest Production for livelihood
  • Conservatism gradually seen as honorific in and of itself: it trickles down
  • Also humans naturally conservative
  • This is what Veblen labels as atavistic! It’s the LEISURE CLASS who are atavistic: this could be applied to give a new explanation of the appeal of primitivism
  • What is the REAL atavism? Veblen says that the leisure class atavism (to the barbaric) isn’t the most instinctual one, but instead that title goes to the one even further back in human history: the peaceable savage: unreflecting group solidarity, complacent sympathy, revulsion against futility and waste, uneager, conscience, truth, equity, and workmanship; goodwill, lack of initiative. THIS IS WHAT IS REPRESSED, yet it’s still there, tenacious
  • Class struggle no longer makes sense in industrial world says Veblen
    • This is a major difference with Marx: makes collective life intrinsic to modern industry, not to its FUTURE (which is Marx’s weak point, that he relies on the future) but instead already there but masked by the past, which needs to be swept away
    • “The collective interests of any modern community centre in industrial efficiency…. This collective interest is best served by honesty, diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without admixture of animistic belief” 227
    • Drawbacks: doesn’t have much beauty, excellenece; very “prosy;” there would be no “enthusiasm” in such a life “but that is beside the point” 228
    • We need people of the peaceable savage type, not the predatory type.
    • Of course admits that individual gain requires different skill set: interests of industry are not the same as the interests of the individual
      • Industry requires impersonal activity and attitudes
    • Don’t think that it would be a simple reversion to archaic attitude, however, b/c you would have some characteristics not present in savage culture: the “stability of aim…singleness of purpose and greater persistence” 238
• Mechanism v Animism
  • Mechanism is industrial: causal, science, control, production
  • Animism: “inscrutable teleological propensity” that is dangerous when it’s anthropomorphized b/c it’s naive and can’t predict accurately; thus it’s bad for industry
    • Examples of animism that you wouldn’t expect: 18th c natural order and natural rights; meliorative evolution
  • Animism: usually a type of religion (predation, status culture, and anthropomorphic cults usually go together, in which the godly force is a superior example of prowess against inferior human force) (also connected to sportsmen and delinquents, who are great believers b/c they bow to relations of force and prowess and status)
• Vicarious
  • Vicarious Conspicuous Waste: wives consuming tons
  • Vicarious Conspicuous Leisure: their wives; their servants, particularly their body servants, who don’t do anything truly productive