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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Veblen say comprises people's standard of living?

2. What does Veblen say possessions indicate in an ownership society?

3. What allowed a leisure class to emerge?

4. Where does Veblen say scholars fit in the social spectrum?

5. How do standards of consumption change?

Short Essay Questions

1. How are habits formed?

2. Where does the institution of a leisure class appear in the development of culture?

3. What was the earliest form of ownership?

4. How has the leisure class evolved from the times of hunting cultures?

5. How does the clergy demonstrate vicarious leisure?

6. How does Veblen define leisure?

7. How did women practice production and consumption in early predatory culture?

8. What kinds of feats replace productivity for the leisure class?

9. How did primitive societies divide the labor?

10. What status is attributed to scholars?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

The master-slave dialectic posits that the masters need the slaves and that the slaves cannot function in an organized way without the masters. But Veblen's theories of vicarious leisure and vicarious consumption describe the servant class as mere evidence of the wealth of the master class. What economic agency does Veblen attribute to the servant class? Does the servant class make itself necessary to the leisure class?

Essay Topic 2

Describe the role Darwinian thinking plays in "The Theory of the Leisure Class." Is Veblen simply applying Darwin's ideas to society, or is he using Darwin's ideas as tools to show things Darwin's theories would not have described?

Essay Topic 3

Is Veblen dividing society into people who blindly follow fashion on one hand and others who see the true value of things on the other? Or is he describing a split in the industrial culture by which people can see the artificiality of their habits at the same time that they perform them?

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