Louis,
It has been several decades since the "Cornell
professor" Doug Dowd was at Cornell. He was
at San Jose State for many years after leaving
Cornell. Now 80 years old, he is retired and mostly
hanging out in Bologna, Italy with his third wife who
runs a feminist bookstore there.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, December 04, 2000 9:15 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:5447] Re: needs
>Micheal Keany wrote:
>>Hi Ken
>>
>>One of the interesting bi-products of our deregulated, "liberated"
>>post-Thatcher world is just how relevant the analyses of older critics
like
>>Marx and Veblen have become once again.
>
>Speaking of Veblen, PEN-L'ers should keep an eye out for a new book by
>Douglas F. Dowd (not the Cornell professor) titled "Thorston Veblen" with
>an introduction by Michael himself. Here's a write-up on amazon.com:
>
>Thorstein Veblen shook the complacency of America in the early twentieth
>century with his incisive criticisms of our social and economic systems.
>Discarding the classical view of "eternal" economic laws that conveniently
>justified the nineteenth-century predatory practices of "big business" in
>terms of rational self-interest, Veblen cast a fresh, merciless eye on
>America's money-making passion.
>
>In glittering prose, Veblen exposed our social system as one designed to
>block man's natural "instinct of workmanship." He demonstrated that our
>leisure-class culture fostered the myth that work was inherently irksome to
>man. Veblen was also fascinated by the machine and the new science of
>technology. He saw businessmen basically at war with engineers and
>scientists because making exorbitant profits did not necessarily jibe with
>making better goods.
>
>In his study of this intriguing personality, Thorstein Veblen, Douglas Dowd
>reveals that Veblen was unsuccessful in his university career and his two
>marriages, and in his private life was strange, bitter, and detached. But
>in his books, Veblen shone as one of America's most penetrating thinkers
>whose theories proved a potent force in the modernization of economics as a
>science. Dowd's sympathetic approach to Veblen's nature and problems places
>this giant in the field against a contemporary background in powerful and
>lively fashion. In his new introduction, Michael Keaney breathes new life
>into this unjustly neglected primer on Veblen. A new generation of students
>will undoubtedly benefit from this comprehensive guide to the thought of
>someone whose intellectual endeavor was non-doctrinaire and constantly
>changing.
>
>About the Author Douglas Dowd was professor of economics at Johns Hopkins
>University. He was Guggenheim Fellow. His writings include, Modern Economic
>Problems in Historical Perspective, America's Role in the World Economy,
>Step by Step, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal, and numerous
>articles for scholarly journals and encyclopedias. Michael Keaney is a
>lecturer in economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>
