Synthesized answer
The provided passages do not directly list or define the specific materialistic assumptions Veblen uses in his analysis. However, they imply a focus on how material possessions and wealth accumulation influence societal values and perceptions.
The text suggests that pecuniary considerations shape how reality is perceived and what is considered valuable [2]. There is a notion of "accumulation of wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence" and the development of "material equipment of appliances" which are tied to the "technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry" [5]. This indicates an underlying assumption that material resources and their control are fundamental to the industrial and social order being analyzed. The passages also describe how "class discrimination" and "distinctions in prerogatives and authentic standing" are prevalent due to the need for "gain in wealth or in rank" [1].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
ss, looking to gradations in respect of comparative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety, reputability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute preclude the well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, from inquiring narrowly into the facts of technology, since these things are beneath their dignity, conventionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters can not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without offence and humiliation be canvassed at all intimately among the better class. At the same time pecuniary competition, when carried to its ideal pitch, works the lower…
and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense impressions are reduced to objective…
ing required by the state of the industrial arts comes to everyone as a matter of course in the routine of daily life. The necessary material equipment of tools and appliances is slight and the acquisition of it is a simple matter that also arranges itself as an incident in the routine of daily life. Given the common run of aptitude for the industrial pursuits incumbent on the members of such a community, the material equipment needful to find a livelihood or to put forth the ordinary productive effort and turn out the ordinary industrial output can be compassed without strain by any…
f observation guided and filled out by the imputation of qualities, relations and aptitudes to the observed phenomena. Without this putative content of active presence and potency the phenomena would lack reality; they could not be assimilated in the scheme of things human. It is only a commonplace of the logic of apperception that the substantial traits of objective facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation of character to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic terms; but it is an anthropomorphism which by…
our and will give the holders of the equipment something more than a momentary advantage in the quest of a livelihood. On the other hand it leads also to an accumulation of wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to anyone but their savage bearer. Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry is given, in that the “roundabout process of production” yields an income above the subsistence of the workmen engaged in it, and the material equipment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live…