He seems to lack any but the most superficial knowledge of any culture but that of Western Europe, and what he had was has gained by reading secondary and tertiary sources (in fact he appears to make very limited use of primary sources at all). His essay on The Technicians and Revolution is risible to anyone who has spent much time around actual engineers, and his essay on The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe shows an equal lack of experience (or experience overridden by expectations) with actual European Jewish culture. Veblen's view on race seem peculiar in this day and age, and although he made a real effort at understanding Darwin and Mendel and applying them scientifically, he appears to have been undermined by his day and age's views on race, both overestimating the genetic variability within groups and overestimating that within the entire human species. However, 68+ years later this is a largely unsupportable view. The Editor's Introduction to the 1948 edition of The Portable Veblen (not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Mckenzie) talks about how well Veblen (who had died in 1929) had worn, how little it was dated.
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