American Leisure Class

THE AMERICAN LEISURE CLASS

Thorstein Veblen

During the earlier stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the better grades of goods – ideally all consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum – pertains normally to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally, after the later peaceable stage has been reached with private ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or on the petty household economy.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure … consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.

This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating,
The code of reputability in matters of dress decides what shapes, colours, materials and general effects in human apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable: and departures from the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from aesthetic truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy dress-stuffs and pronounced colour effects, for instance, offend us at times when the vogue is goods of a high, glossy finish and neutral colours. A fancy bonnet of this year’s model unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more forcibly than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of least year: although when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a century, it would, I apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty to award the palm for intrinsic beauty to the one rather that to the other of these