Thorstein Veblen seemed from the first like a good place to begin this series on “Books that Changed Their Minds.” His most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was the oldest of the books featured in Malcolm Cowley’s 1938 New Republic forum that I’m using as my springboard,[1] and, along with John Dewey, he was the only author to have five titles on the longer list that Cowley assembled. (For the curious: Walter Lippmann, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Beatrice & Sidney Webb were the only others with as many as three titles listed.) But as Read more