Is wealthy Silicon Valley venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel a world-class intellectual — one of the great geniuses of our time?  This is what journalist Roger Parloff claims, in a puff piece in Fortune that sets a new standard in sycophancy:

A gifted rhetorician and provocateur with a bottomless pocketbook, Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today, assuming a mantle once held by the likes of Thorstein Veblen or Norman Mailer.

The Norman Mailer-Peter Thiel comparison may be apt.  Norman Mailer was a shameless publicity hound who should have stuck to what he was good at — writing fiction.

But is Fortune correct that Peter Thiel can be compared to the early 20th-century American economist and social thinker Thorstein Veblen?  Let’s compare the intellectual achievements of Thorstein Veblen and Peter Thiel.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was a brilliant satirical observer of modern capitalist society responsible for many coinages that have entered the English lexicon, like “the higher learning,” “the leisure class” and “conspicuous consumption.”

Like Thorstein Veblen, Peter Thiel knows something about coinages.  He co-founded PayPal.

Thorstein Veblen and Peter Thiel have both been critics of American higher education.  In “The Higher Learning in America”(1918), Veblen claimed that American higher education had been warped by the insistence of wealthy regents and their sycophants in the press and public that colleges and universities be run like businesses.

What are Peter Thiel’s contributions to debates about higher education in the U.S.?  Here is the one, according to Fortune:

In 1995 he and Sacks published a book called The Diversity Myth, in which they argued that in the campus context, “those persons complaining about oppression are generally not the ones to have experienced it firsthand.” In one disturbing passage they come to the defense of a law student friend who in 1992 had shouted an antigay slur outside the cottage of a gay resident fellow as a protest against campus speech codes. The authors argue that the law student’s near-universal execration afterward, official and unofficial, was disproportionate to his offense.

Thiel’s contributions  to American higher education go beyond defending students who shout anti-gay slurs on campus.  Here is another of Thiel’s ideas about education, according to the Fortune profile:

Thiel’s most infamous charitable project has probably been his 20 Under 20 program, which provides gifted students between the ages of 18 and 20 with $100,000 to launch their own startups. …Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the program “the single most misdirected philanthropy in this decade,” according to TechCrunch, while Slate Group chairman Jacob Weisberg wrote in Newsweek, “Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or pursuing knowledge for its own sake.”

Thorstein Veblen’s contributions to scholarship included political sociology as well as economics.  In “Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution” (1915), Veblen argued that the combination of authoritarian and militarist traditions and modern industrialism in Germany and Japan would make them dangerous powers — an analysis borne out in World War II, following Veblen’s death in 1929.

Peter Thiel, like Thorstein Veblen, has contributed to political theory.  In a 2009 essay for the libertarian Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound, Thiel argued that allowing women to vote had resulted in disaster:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.

You have to give Thiel credit for pushing the intellectual envelope.  I don’t know of anybody else who argues that lady suffragettes of the Model T Ford era doomed democratic capitalism to be replaced by totalitarian collectivism.  Mainstream scholars in universities and think tanks have yet to wrestle with Thiel’s controversial thesis that modern countries are dying from bloated welfare states because women are allowed to vote.  Perhaps he is ahead of his time.

The man whom Fortune calls “America’s leading public intellectual today” also has heterodox thoughts about the nature of political sovereignty.  In his capacity as a “public intellectual,” as well as his capacity as a deep-pockets donor, Thiel has supported the “seastead” movement.  Tired of losing elections to “statists” like Democrats and Republicans, libertarian “seasteaders” hope to renounce their U.S. citizenship and found their own sovereign, libertarian-only micro-states, to be built on repurposed oil derricks in international waters.

Now why didn’t Thorstein Veblen think of that?

What has the genius crowned by Fortune as “America’s leading public intellectual” been thinking lately?

Breakout Labs shines a spotlight on a contrarian contention Thiel has been advancing in essays, talks, and debates since about 2008, which has come to be known as the “tech stagnation thesis.” Thiel contends that the amazing advances we have seen in computer science and communications have masked ominously disappointing progress in energy, transportation, biotech, disease prevention, and space travel. That slowdown, he maintains, accounts for the near stagnation in real incomes and wages we have experienced since 1973, and for widening inequality in wealth distribution.