affairs during the First World War was little appreciated and his advice
to politicians ignored.^31
Nevertheless, Veblen’s concepts still repay attention, even if the frame-
work of his ideas was a nineteenth century one and his style not
memorable. What makes Veblen’s approach to material culture interest-
ing is its anthropological dimension. For many historians, with Marx’s
‘fetishism of commodities’ringing in their ears, artefacts have evoked
faint interest at best. It has been the role of anthropologists to remind us
that objects matter and how far our understanding of and appreciation
for others is shaped by the material objects with which we surround
ourselves.^32 In his conclusion to a recent study of the domestic environ-
ment of a complete London street, the anthropologist Daniel Miller has
reflected on the highly charged relationship that we have with everyday
objects:‘An advantage of this unusual perspective [our relationship with
objects] is that sometimes these apparently mute forms can be made to
speak more easily and eloquently to the nature of relationships than can
those with persons.’^33 Objects can speak more clearly, or more acutely,
about our relationships with the material world, and with each other,
thanfirst person statements sometimes do. He goes on to say that
‘objects create subjects much more than the other way round,’and that
this realization should make us take material culture much more ser-
iously than we do in practice.
Miller’s conversations with the householders of Stuart Street are a live
engagement with the kinds of abstract ideas coming out of anthropo-
logical enquiries that are providing students of material culture with a
rich source for research. Veblen’s critics were scornful of his focus on the
importance of technology in history. Veblen himself was scornful of Karl
Marx’s evaluation of the history of technology, because he saw in Marx’s
world-view a Hegelian (or rather a Benthamite), crypto-optimistic phil-
osophy, which had to be superseded by a Darwinian perspective on the
complex organization of human societies.^34 Darwinian biology has been
valorized a century after the publication ofOn the Origin of Species, but
historians are still very uncertain about how to view Darwinian ideas in a
cultural perspective. The intellectual exploration of the dynamic rela-
tionship between the human family and its material environment was
(^31) See Max Lerner’s Introduction toThe Portable Veblen, 1 – 49, esp. 10–43; Hodgson
1998; Banta, Introduction to the Oxford World Classics 2007 edition, i 32 – xv.
Appadurai 1986, 6–16 on the‘fetishism’that Marx identified; 30–3 on Veblen’s ideas.
(^33) Miller 2008, 287.
(^34) Thorstein Veblen,‘The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx’, in Veblen 1919, 409– 56
(originally published in 1906).
154 Thelongue duréein the north Aegean