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Interpreters of Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System ([1921] 1932) have treated this set of essays as a serious prediction of a revolution that would be led by the engineering professions, and have understood Veblen to be putting himself forward as an organizer of the revolution. This prediction, and the activism implied, are often treated as a strange departure from Veblen's earlier work and his disengaged approach, explanation for which is often found in Veblen's acquaintance with a few progressive engineers whom he encountered at the New School for Social Research just after World War I. A variation on this explanation is that Veblen, though aware of earlier engineering activism, remained unpersuaded of the ability of engineers to take good and effective social action until they themselves organized in the wake of World War I.
In this article we argue that this interpretation of Veblen's treatment of the engineers should be revised in recognition that
1. Veblen's late treatment of the engineers in The Engineers and the Price System was very much like his treatment of "technicians" in "Industrial and Pecuniary Employments" ([1900] 1990) and The Theory of Business Enterprise ([1904) 1932).
2. From the 1880s through the 1920s many engineers presented arguments that closely paralleled those that Veblen used in his own discussions of the possible role of engineers in changing American capitalism. The flurry of activity at the New School in the 1920s-usually held to be the source of Veblen's ideas about the engineers-was but a late fluorescence of a movement that Veblen himself must have known to be fading.
We will argue that The Engineers and the Price System was a semipopular restatement of an old Veblenian argument and that Veblen would not have seen the events surrounding and following the publication of this late work as in any sense a departure from his earlier elaboration of engineering thought, nor a departure from his own detached role as reporter on the changing American economy. After a brief review of the traditional interpretation of Veblen on the engineers, we will offer evidence for these propositions.
Interpretations of Veblen on the Engineers
In a series of articles published in the Dial in 1919 and then collected under the title The Engineers and...