The author, a major American economist and sociologist, is a representative of a critical, bourgeois-reformist trend in the American political economy. Veblen's views are controversial and combine criticism of many aspects of the capitalist mode of production with petty-bourgeois projectionism and utopianism. Within capitalism, Veblen contrasted two groups: businessmen engaged mainly in speculative operations, and technical specialists, without whom the functioning of the "industrial system" is impossible. Veblen considered the first group as reactionary and harmful to society and considered it necessary to remove it from material production. Veblen proposed to transfer the leadership of the economy and the entire society to the production and technical intelligentsia. The author sharply criticized capitalism, financial oligarchy, idle class. The Russian translation is published for the first time.