Veblen and Toronto

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10,No. 3, Winter 1979 VeblenandToronto Robert D. Cuff John P. Diggins. The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory. New York: The Seabury Press. 1978. 257 + vii pp. In 1909 the University of Toronto rejected a job application from Thorstein Veblen. His marital difficulties had already torpedoed a four-year stay at the University of Chicago from 1902 to 1906, and now, at forty-two years of age and the author of two books, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Veblen, enmeshed once again in"woman trouble," faced the loss of his Associate Professorship at Stanford. "What is one to do," Veblen explained to friends who had become annoyed with him over the issue, "if the woman moves in on you ?'1 We can only imagine what the course of Canadian social thought might have been had Veblen subsequently found his way to Toronto instead of to the University of Missouri. Veblen might not have considered Canadian questions of course. Yet a stay in Canada did have an impact on British-born economist W. J. Ashley.2 And given Veblen's "idle curiosity," his sensitivity to cultural nuance, and the reinforcement Toronto might have given a vision already well outside the American mainstream, there is some reason to think Veblen would have responded creatively to the challenge of a new environment. Aspects of Veblen's work and sensibility found their way to Canada, however, even if Veblen did not. For example, Stephen Leacock, 0. D. Skelton and Mackenzie King studied with Veblen at Chicago. What Leacock owes to Veblen as a student of the leisure class is of course evident in 348 Robert D. Cuff The Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich, among other works. And Mackenzie King, who read Capital under Veblen's tutelage, regarded Veblen's lectures on socialism "the best I have ever listened to."3 After absorbing Veblen's critique of Marxist thought, King could go on to Harvard with his Christian idealism even more firmly entrenched. Veblen might subvert King's putative socialism, but he could not exorcise the future Prime Minister's animism. Harold Innis also studied economics at the University of Chicago, as had several McMaster University graduates before him. By the time he arrived in the summer of 1918, however, Veblen had left academe altogether toJOin The Dial magazine in New York City. But the Veblen legacy remained strong at Chicago, and Innis learned his Veblen from both an informal graduate study group he joined and from the teaching of two Veblen admirers, F. H. Knight and John M. Clark. Nor did Innis abandon his interest when he returned to Canada. He revised his thesis on the Canadian Pacific Railway with Veblen in mind, and he advanced Veblenesque ideas in Toronto departmental seminars, much to the annoyance of his Department head.4 Innis emulated Veblen the economist in a Canadian setting, and the nature of his intellectual debt is suggested in the bibliographical survey of Veblen's writings he published in 1929. Innis characterized Veblen as the first to attempt a general stock-taking of general tendencies in a dynamic society saddled with machine industry, just as Adam Smith was the first to present a general stock-takmg before machine industry came in.... Only less conspicuous was his attempt to maintain an unbiased approach .... His anxiety has always been to detect trends and to escape their effects.... Like Adam Smith, he is an individualist, and like most individuals in contmental countries in which the industrial revolution made such rapid strides. he is in revolt against mass education and standardization .... He attempted to outline the economics of dynamic change and to work out a theory not only of dynamics but cyclonics.5 The Canadian economist did not accept every piece of Veblen's intellectual architecture, but as Robin Neill clearly demonstrates Innis remodelled from the inside. For example, Innis so thoroughly absorbed Veblen's critique of neoclassical economics that according to Neill "his work presupposes Veblen's and cannot be understood outside of that context" (p. 109). Similarly , Innis elaborated his seminal theory of growth...