Thorstein Veblen, Bard of Democracy

Few remember Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) as a connoisseur of beauty or champion beauty’s importance to an institutionally modern and technologically sophisticated society. Similarly few credit with any constructive theory politics. Yet Veblen’s conception the beautiful, his account its role in human cultural evolution, critique perversion industrialized societies nineteenth early twentieth centuries are invaluable contemporary social-aesthetic aims political economic reconstruction. In contrast memory, real devoted significant intellectual energy building what thinkers today call public work: creative, negotiated, open-ended production shared goods by individuals alert both self-interest collective needs. Partaking rich tradition philosophical pragmatism, Veblen's social aesthetics also points that tradition's continuing value for aesthetic, social, theory. Indeed, further augmented recent advances evolutionary theory, pragmatist, public-work suggests vision democratic citizenship defined cooperative imagination, production, critique, re-creation moral material commonwealth. The so-called “bard savagery,” therefore, is better understood democracy,” narrating travails affirming ideals culture aspiring self-government. His might lend fragmented field common, compelling narrative own.