Thorstein Veblen and the rhetoric of authority
"'WHATEVER IS, IS WRONG.'" THAT SENTIMENT, THE FULCRUM OF Veblen's most famous book, mocks the "enlightened" faith in progress and order that he never tired of challenging. Serving his two main and, as many see them, competing roles as social scientist and social critic, "whatever is, is wrong" might well be Veblen's motto. To the Darwinian social scientist whose only certainty is that things will change, "whatever is, is wrong" is an analytic concept describing the inevitability of cultural lag. As he says several pages before dropping his bomb, "institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present."' But to the social critic and master satirist, "whatever is, is wrong" is a weapon for attack and a shield under which to duck for cover. Veblen's motto suggests the passionate engagement of his Olympian detachment. A reassessment of Thorstein Veblen as both social scientist and social critic is under way. His methodological essays collected as The Place of Science in Modern Civilization were reissued in paperback in 1990 with Warren Samuels's introduction, which positioned Veblen in the vanguard of writers who have "concern[ed themselves] with the