Thorstein Veblen

The Engineers and the Price System Thorstein Veblen

2012 Reprint of 1921 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Veblen proposed a soviet of engineers in one chapter in "The Engineers and the Price System." Veblen believed that engineers, not workers, would overthrow capitalism. He had a penchant for socialism and believed that technological developments would eventually lead toward a socialistic organization of economic affairs. However, his views on socialism and the nature of the evolutionary process of economics differed sharply from that of Karl Marx; while Marx saw socialism as the ultimate goal for civilization and saw the working class as the group that would establish it, Veblen saw socialism as one intermediate phase in an ongoing evolutionary process in society that would be brought about by the natural decay of the business enterprise system and by the inventiveness of engineers. A classic work.