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1 In 1919, when he turned his attention to the achievements of Jews in modern science, the great economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen was sixty-two years old, weary, and despondent. Twenty years had passed since he had published the book that made him famous, his notorious attack on America’s well-heeled, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Since then, he had left his first wife in an asylum, never to see her again, and had remarried only to witness his second wife’s breakdown and internment in McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, in 1920, she died as he stood at her bedside.1 He quit university life in a huff twice, leaving Stanford in 1909 and the University of Missouri in 1918, the second time taking a job as the editor of The Dial, a New York politics and arts magazine with a socialist bent.2 These were productive years for Veblen (remarkably so given the tumult of his personal life and that of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and more), but what he produced was pessimistic. In 1918, he published The Higher Learning in America, a zealous condemnation of the destructive effect of businessmen-donors on weak-willed university administrators reluctant “to forego their habitual preoccupation with petty intrigue and bombastic publicity.”3 He was also at this time hard at work on The Engineers and the Price System, arguing that society will improve only when scientists and engineers join forces with working men against the monied and self-serving “Guardians of the Vested Interests.”4 In 1918, he published an essay in The Dial arguing that nation-states themselves “serve substantially no other purpose than obstruction, retardation and a lessened efficiency.” The effort of workers to dismantle the nation-state, he continued, is at the heart of “that prospective contest between the vested interests and the common man out of which the New Order is to emerge, in INTRODUCTION “Ridiculously Disproportionate”? 2 a chosen calling case the outcome of the struggle turns in favor of the common man.”5 This statement holds a key to much of the rest of his writing, and to Veblen’s ragged radicalism. The Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution (which Veblen admired),6 the rise of Zionism (which Veblen admired and regretted)7 —all these were harbingers of a New Order that might emerge, were it not for “vested interests” and entrenched elites who were preventing it. It was the end of an era, Veblen saw, or at least it should and could be. It was with the weight of all this on his heart that Veblen wrote “The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe.” His premise, he was sure, was undeniable: It is plain that the civilization of Christendom continues today to draw heavily on the Jews for men devoted to science and scholarly pursuits. It is not only that men of Jewish extraction continue to supply more than a proportionate quota to the rank and file engaged in scientific and scholarly work, but a disproportionate number of the men to whom modern science and scholarship look for guidance and leadership are of the same derivation. Particularly is this true of the modern sciences, and it applies perhaps especially in the field of scientific theory, even beyond the extent of its application in the domain of workday detail. So much is notorious.8 Veblen wondered why this was. The explanation he arrived at was that Jews had only recently freed themselves from the oppressive influence of their rabbis and traditions, and had not yet been sufficiently accepted in Christian society to come under the thumb of its ministers, politicians, and fat-cats—the same “vested interests” that were destroying the universities, bedeviling scientists and engineers, and suppressing the working stiff. Jews were the free radicals of Western civilization. Unbound, they developed an attitude of skepticism toward received pieties. They excelled at irony and alienation. These traits, Veblen argued, were precisely the traits required to excel at science:“The first requisite for constructive work in modern science . . . is a skeptical frame of mind.” Unmoored,“a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s land,” the Jew “becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace,” which is just what it takes to overturn the laws of physics or rewrite the book of life or reinvent the human psyche.9 Veblen may have been the first scholar to ask why Jews succeeded extravagantly in modern science, but he was not...

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