Globalising Intellectual Property Rights: The TRIPs Agreement
Price System, and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. He expanded on earlier themes and introduced new ideas, including the "soviet of technicians" and the illegitimacy of stock ownership. In Absentee Ownership he argued that America's greatest threat lay not in Bolshevism and the IWW but in the "One Big Union of financial interests" which controlled America's economy. Spindler argues that Veblen's later writings differ from his pre-war writings more in tone than in substance. In his early writings, he seemed more of a disinterested spectator making scientific observations on his subject matter. Afrer he left the academic world for good in 1918,his writing became more acerbic and polemic. Now he was making judgments as well as observations. Veblen was also the first to point out the factors that were changing American society from a production-driven economy to a consumer-driven one. America during and after the first World War saw a rise in the availability of durable goods including the automobile. The possession of goods became more than just a need to use them; it also was a measure of a person's social status. Production of products became less important than the marketing of products. In this, Veblen saw the middle class emulating the leisure class. Spindler reviews the influence of Veblen in two chapters. In one, he provides a quick literature search of books and articles pertaining to Veblen from the publication of Leisure Class to the present day along with a brief comment on their contents. Veblen was fairly well received during his lifetime and until the 1950s. His views on the inherent contradictions of business and industry seemed prescient after the crash of 1929, and he was held in wide esteem. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, his reputation began to sink, in part due to the political climate of the era. Through the 1970s and 1980s, his significance was debated, and only during the past decade does there appear to be a revival of the interest that was shown in him during the early part of the twentieth century. Spindler, who teaches American literature, also devotes a chapter to tracing the influences Veblen had on American writers of fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. These show particularly in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. This is an excellent book to introduce Veblen to readers who have had little or no previous contact with his ideas. It is not a biography or an in-depth study of his ideas. Rather it is a summary of them that whets the appetite to learn more about him.