Thorstein Veblen's Absentee Ownership.

The title of Absentee Ownership is itself typical of Veblen's use of language. True, on the title page the full title is given: Absentee Ownership (in large caps) and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (in smaller caps) and The Case of America (in smaller caps yet), but the title on the cover is Absentee Ownership. I confess that not until I turned to the introduction did I realize that the title technically included the words cited here. For me, and I would wager that for 99 percent of its readers, the book was Absentee Ownership. Even in this Veblen is peculiar. For ordinary folk Absentee Ownership is two words but for Veblen the two really constituted one word, "Absentee-ownership." Veblen was extraordinarily concerned with the precise use of words. J. Dorfman states (Thornstein Veblen and His America, Viking Press, p. 324), "He was so meticulous in this respect that he declared that there are no synonyms in the English language. Veblen did not actually create words de nouveau, but he did create neologisms out of words lying about. These neologisms were a major base for his claim to be the number one prose stylist of American social analysts - or for that matter of the English-speaking world after the eighteenth century. These new words were almost all composed of two perfectly well known words lying about. It is easy to list some: leisure class, conspicuous consumption, ostentatious display, business enterprise, putative profits, parental bent, idle curiosity (defined by four words, the propensity to pry), higher learning, and, of course absentee ownership. His works built around these "words" made so powerful an impression that people who never read, or even heard of Veblen, use them as single words.

Absentee Ownership was not the least of these, and Veblen used it with telling effect. Even in Veblen's day, the vast majority of people were farmers of one sort or another. They lived out their lives on a localized basis with an ideal of as much self-sufficiency as possible. The absentee landlord or his equivalent, the feudal landlord, was and is a figure of dark connotations. He not only represents an intrusion on desired levels of self-sufficiency, but he is usually a person who neither knows nor cares about the local community. The members of that community struggle to thwart his desire to get as much as possible out of the land and out of the people whom he may or may not own as well. He is not only a frustration of desired levels of self-sufficiency; he is an outsider to boot. It is, alas, not true that people have always placed a high value on personal freedom. Throughout history high levels of hierarchy have generally been taken for granted as normal and natural. People have not generally felt that he or she governs best, who governs least - but almost to a person they have felt that he or she governs best who governs most locally. Even though the absentee landlord be technically defined by economic ownership, such allocations of goods (in this case property rights) and services can never be irrelevant to governance - and vice versa. The absentee landlord is thus not only as absentee owner of land; he is simultaneously an absentee source of governance. General governance at great distance may have been a rarity until modern history - high levels of local self-sufficiency were both ideally and actually taken for granted, but high levels of absentee landlordism were not. It is not the role of landlord or ownership that casts a pall on these relationships, it is the qualifier, absentee.

It is safe to say that absentee as a term before Veblen was applied most often to landlordism and the holding of political roles, and it always cast the pall of outsiderism and hence an overwhelming …