Reviewer:
Roger Albert
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July 1, 2022
Subject:
Veblen is not obsolete.
It's tempting I guess to dismiss writers whose works appeared a hundred years ago. In the case of Thorstein Veblen that would be a huge mistake.
I wrote a dissertation on the works of Harold Innis in the late 1970s. That tells you how old I am. Innis was a close follower of Veblen's work and appreciated its cohesion and substance. In this work he does a great service to anyone interested in Veblen. His knowledge of the scope of Veblen's work comes through clearly in this bibliography. For my interest, Veblen's The Place of Science in Modern Civilization takes precedence along with The Instinct of Workmanship and the article entitled The Limitations of Marginal Utility Theory. Innis shares this interest, I believe. Innis died a relatively young man but by the time of his death in 1952 he had exhausted his specific interests in more or less esoteric aspects of Canadian political economy and focussed on what he always considered the underpinnings of his work, that is the spread of Western Civilization throughout the world. Veblen would have appreciated Innis' turn towards the end of his life.