Daily Inspiration Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Veblen’s line is an ice-cold diagnosis dressed up as a compliment. “Beautiful and ennobling” sounds like high-minded praise until you remember who’s talking: the economist who made his name by showing how “taste” is often just class power in costume. The sentence mimics the voice of polite society, then quietly exposes it. Leisure isn’t merely restful; it’s treated as evidence. It “ennobles” because it signals you can afford to waste time, and in Veblen’s world, wasting time is a kind of credential.

The key move is the phrase “in all civilised men’s eyes.” Veblen isn’t reporting an eternal truth; he’s naming a social consensus and hinting at its absurdity. “Civilised” is doing ideological work: it frames a very specific, historically contingent hierarchy (the genteel, property-owning, often male leisure class) as the natural endpoint of culture. If everyone “civilised” agrees, dissent becomes self-disqualifying. The subtext is coercive: accept the prestige of leisure or be marked as crude, merely useful, insufficiently refined.

Context matters. Writing in the Gilded Age, Veblen watched industrial capitalism generate vast fortunes alongside brutal labor conditions, then saw elites convert money into moral status through “conspicuous leisure.” The line captures how class societies aestheticize inequality: the idle become “beautiful,” the working become background. Veblen’s intent isn’t to celebrate leisure; it’s to show how admiration itself can be an economic institution, training the public to confuse unproductiveness with superiority.