Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America.

As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the United States, Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen was a bitter critic of production for profit. Although the reading public saw him as a political radical or socialist, he never committed himself to any form of political action, although his emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of fascism, capitalism, and of technological determinism. A harsh examination of corporate finance, Veblen's final work provides a lengthy investigation into the contradiction between the industrial arts and business enterprise.