One of Veblen’s final works, originally published in America in the previous year, in which he targeted ‘the predation and waste of the corporate capitalist order. Writing in a more polemical style than before, Veblen endorsed the dispossession of absentee owners and business-minded executives from the American corporation’ (Rick Tilman, ‘Thorstein Veblen’ in A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, p. 699).
Veblen concluded ‘that the forces of business-as-usual and of national integrity were steadily coalescing ‘by night and cloud’ and that the continued supremacy of business nationalism would probably lead to a renewal of the servile despotism characteristic of earlier epochs’ (IESS).
