Waste and Value: Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells

Abstract

Introducing Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, William Cohen declares: “polluting or filthy objects” can “become conceivably productive, the discarded sources in which riches may lie.” “Riches,” though, have often been construed as “waste.” The reversibility of the poles -- wealth and waste, waste and wealth -- became especially apparent with the advent of a so-called consumer society dur- ing the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of the first analysts of that economistic way of understanding modernity, including Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells, made this reversibility central to their ideas. But such reversibility has a much longer history, involving a general shift from economic and social theories that seek to make clear distinctions between wealth and waste to modern ones where the distinctions blur, as in Veblen and Wells; in some versions of post-modernism the distinctions dissolve altogether.