The rest of the resume: Veblen’s teaching and service activities

Thorstein Veblen is commonly depicted as a marginal, socially detached academic recluse, whose theoretical work was produced in isolation from his colleagues and students. This stereotype involves the separation of Veblen’s teaching and service activities from his ideas, as if the latter developed without the influence of the former. The chapter shows that Veblen was hardly an academic recluse, and that his various teaching and service responsibilities at the University of Chicago (1892–1906) were a factor in the development of his ideas. Veblen’s role as the managing editor of the Journal of Political Economy, his two terms on the Council of the American Economic Association, his work as a translator and his heavy involvement with teaching led him to interact on a practically daily basis with his professional colleagues and students around many of the very same issues he was writing about.