Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Veblen's Contexts: Valdres, Norway and Europe; Filiations of Economics; and Economics for an Age of Crises
- Part One Norwegian Origins and Personal Life
- Part Two American Education
- Part Three Veblen's Politics
- 9 Thorstein Veblen and the Politics of Predatory Power
- 10 Veblen, War and Peace
- 11 Veblen's ‘Higher Learning': The Scientist as Sisyphus in the Iron Cage of a University
- Part Four Veblen's Economics
- Name Index
- Subject Index
11 - Veblen's ‘Higher Learning': The Scientist as Sisyphus in the Iron Cage of a University
from Part Three - Veblen's Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Veblen's Contexts: Valdres, Norway and Europe; Filiations of Economics; and Economics for an Age of Crises
- Part One Norwegian Origins and Personal Life
- Part Two American Education
- Part Three Veblen's Politics
- 9 Thorstein Veblen and the Politics of Predatory Power
- 10 Veblen, War and Peace
- 11 Veblen's ‘Higher Learning': The Scientist as Sisyphus in the Iron Cage of a University
- Part Four Veblen's Economics
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into ape by it, had soon to give up teaching and was taken away to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon let out again.
But I used up many teachers, indeed, several teachers at once. As I became more confident of my abilities, as the public took an interest in my progress and my future began to look bright, I engaged teachers for myself, established them in five communicating rooms and took lessons from them all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other.
That progress of mine! How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain! I do not deny it: I found it exhilarating. But I must also confess: I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Thorstein VeblenEconomics for an Age of Crises, pp. 257 - 280Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012
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