The Theory of the Leisure Class

Veblen's book about money opens nowhere near a bank. Its first pages are about feudal Europe, feudal Japan, Brahmin India and the chieftains of the Icelandic sagas, set down in the flat, patient tone of a man recording the customs of a remote people.

That tone is the joke, and it is also the method. Veblen treats the rich as a tribe: a group with its own taboos, rituals and marks of rank, to be studied from the outside rather than admired or envied from below.

He never winks. He simply keeps describing, calmly and at length, until sooner or later the reader notices that the tribe lives on her own street.

The word that trips everyone up is "leisure". It sounds like hammocks. Veblen means something colder: not rest, but exemption from productive work.

In the societies he opens with, the upper classes are kept out of the everyday business of getting a living, and he is blunt about what that signifies: "this exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank." Not working is not a side effect of being high-born. It is how everyone can tell.

So a leisure-class life can be exhausting. A feudal lord might spend his days in the saddle, at war, at court or at the hunt. What makes it leisure is that none of that effort produces anything to eat, wear or live in.

In Veblen's sense of the term, what makes someone a member of the leisure class?

• Being kept out of productive work as a mark of rank✓Correct answer
• Having plenty of free time and few duties to fill it
• Owning more land, cattle and goods than the neighbours
• Living for pleasure and comfort instead of for duty

Leisure here means exemption from productive labour, and that exemption is what signals rank. A warlord's days can be full and dangerous and still count as leisure, because none of the effort goes into making a living; free time and pleasure are beside the point.

Look at what the upper classes are actually allowed to do, and the list is short. Veblen gives the same four items every time: government, warfare, religious observances and sports.

Warfare usually ranks first and the priesthood second, though in a less warlike society the priest may take the lead. Brahmin India, in his reading, shows both classes held apart from industry at once.

What the four share is not that they are easy, pleasant or safe. It is that none of them has anything to do with the daily work of feeding and clothing people. Nobody at a war council is spinning wool, and the whole arrangement depends on that being obvious to everyone watching.

Here is the detail that turns privilege into something stranger. In a community like saga-age Iceland, Veblen writes, the men of the upper classes are not merely exempt from manual work. By custom they are debarred from it.

That is a prohibition, not a perk. A chieftain who discovered he enjoyed carpentry would not be exercising his freedom. He would be breaking a rule the whole community enforces, and paying for it in standing.

At the very top the rule tightens further. For kings and chieftains, those four employments are the only ones common sense will allow, and where the system is well developed, even sports begin to look doubtfully proper for the highest rank.

According to Veblen, in a fully developed scheme even sports can look slightly improper for someone of the very highest rank.

True✓Correct answer

He says so directly: where the scheme is well developed, sports are of doubtful legitimacy for kings and chieftains. The rule of exemption tightens as rank rises, so the top of the ladder has the fewest permitted pursuits, not the most.