Thorstein Veblen

“ The ancient ruts of savage thought and conviction are smooth and easy; but however sweet and indispensable the archaic ways of thinking may be to the civilised man's peace of mind, yet such is the binding force of matter-of-fact analysis and inference under modern conditions that the findings of science are not questioned on the whole. The name of science is after all a word to conjure with. So much so that the name and the mannerisms, at least, if nothing more of science, have invaded all fields of learning and have even overrun territory that belongs to the enemy. ”

“ Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the taking of life—the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute or human—is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an expression of the slayer’s prepotence, casts a glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a honorific employment. ”

“ But the only secure basis of an enduring party tenure of the government machinery is a business policy which falls in with the interests or the prejudices of the effective majority.
In international competition the ultima ratio is, as ever, warlike force, whether the issue be between princes of the grace of God or princes of ownership. It is a favorite maxim of modern politics that trade follows the flag. This is the business man's valuation of national policy and of the ends of national life. ”

“ For it is a matter of course to that generation that Nature is essentially rational in her aims and logic as well as in the technology of her work; very much after the fashion of the master craftsman, who goes to his work with an intelligent oversight of the available260 means and the purpose to be wrought out, as well as with a firm and facile touch on all that passes under his trained hand. Like the perfect craftsman, “Nature never makes mistakes,” “never makes a jump,” “never does anything in vain,” “never turns out anything but perfect work.” ”

“ The making of states and dynasties, the founding of families, the prosecution of feuds, the propagation of creeds and the creation of sects, the accumulation of fortunes, the consumption of superfluities—these have all in their time been felt to justify themselves as an end of endeavor; but in the eyes of modern civilised men all these things seem futile in comparison with the achievements of science. They dwindle in men's esteem as time passes, while the achievements of science are held higher as time passes. ”

“ It may seem invidious to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe. The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious distinction—of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it—is that the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and no small volume of it in the aggregate, that is of much the same character, and serviceable for the same purposes as the resources and man-power of the Empire. ”

“ When a man achieves such notoriety for scientific attainments as to give him a high value as an article of parade, the chances are that he is endowed with some share of the scientific animus, and he is likely to have fallen into the habit of rating the triumphs of science above those of the market place. Such a person will almost unavoidably affect the spirit of any academic corps into which he is intruded. He will also, in a measure, bend the forces of the establishment to a long-term efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than to the pursuit of a reputable notoriety from day to day. ”

“ The workman's force, ingenuity, and dexterity was the ultimate economic factor, - ultimate in a manner patent to the common sense of a generation habituated to the system of handicraft, how ever doubtful such a view may appear in the eyes of a generation in whose apprehension the workman is no longer the prime mover nor the sole, or even chief, efficient factor in the industrial process. ”

“ Doubtless a boyish imitation of such business enterprise has had its share in the propagation of these educational excursions. It all has an histrionic air, such as would suggest that its use, at least in good part, might be to serve as an outlet for the ambition and energies of an executive gifted with a penchant for large and difficult undertakings, and with scant insight into the needs and opportunities of a corporation of the higher learning, and who might therefore be carried off his scholastic footing by the glamour of the exploits of the trustmakers. ”

“ Athletics have an obvious advantage over the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning, since success as an athlete presumes, not only a waste of time, but also a waste of money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial archaic traits of character and temperament. ”

“ But just as it would be a bootless enterprise to cut modern science back into handicraft technology, so would it be a gratuitous imbecility to prune back the modern university to that inchoate phase of its life-history and make it again a corporation for the training of theologians, jurists and doctors of medicine. ”

“ But through the centuries of its earlier growth the handicraft industry, simply as a routine of workmanship, shaped the conditions of life for the common people more pervasively and consistently than any other one factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted duration and touched the current habits of thought in an intimate and enduring fashion; so as to leave a large and enduring effect on the institutions of the peoples among whom it prevailed. ”

“ The faith in and aspiration after matter-of-fact knowledge is too profoundly ingrained in the modern community, and too consonant with its workday habit of mind, to admit of its supersession by any objective end alien to it, -- at least for the present and until some stronger force than the technological discipline of modern life shall take over the primacy among the factors of civilization, and so give us a culture of a different character from that which has brought on this modern science and placed it at the centre of things human. ”

“ So late an innovation, indeed, is this modern institution of "capitalism,"—the predominant ownership of industrial capital as we know it,—and yet so intimate a fact is it in our familiar scheme of life, that we have some difficulty in seeing it in perspective at all, and we find ourselves hesitating between denying its existence, on the one hand, and affirming it to be a fact of nature antecedent to all human institutions, on the other hand. ”

“ The free workman, master of his own motions and with discretion as to what he would turn his efforts to, if to anything, had by Locke's time become an habitual fact in the life of the English community to such a degree that free labor, of the character of handicraft, was accepted uncritically as the fundamental factor in all human economy, and as the presumptive original fact in industry and in the struggle for wealth. ”

“ We all feel, sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous violation of our human dignity. ”

“ It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case, there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's productive forces. ”

“ A doubt may plausibly suggest itself as to the competency of such an explanation of these phenomena. It would seem scarcely to lie in the nature of an instinct of workmanship to enlist the workman in the acquisition of knowledge which he cannot use, and guide him in elaborating it into a system which will defeat his own ends; to build up obstructions to its own working, and yet in the long run to overcome them. In part this discrepancy in the outcome arises from the fact that the sense of workmanship affords a norm of systematisation for the facts that come into knowledge. ”

“ Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of human culture, how the common man is to fare under this régime of law and order,—the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these pacific nations. ”

“ At a point below which little if any pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like, is observable, and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at ostensible leisure, decency still requires the wife to consume some goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head. So that, as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution, the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the man, both in fact and in theory—the producer of goods for him to consume—has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces. ”

“ Of course, in no case and with no class does the discipline of the machine process mould the habits of life and of thought fully into its own image. There is present in the human nature of all classes too large a residue of the propensities and aptitudes carried over from the past and working to a different result. The machine's regime has been of too short duration, strict as its discipline may be, and the body of inherited traits and traditions is too comprehensive and consistent to admit of anything more than a remote approach to such a consummation. ”

“ Under the capitalistic system, that is to say under the system of modern business traffic, production is a production of commodities, merchantable goods, with a view to the price to be obtained for them in the market. The great fact on which all industry under this system hinges is the price of marketable goods. Therefore it is at this point that Marx strikes into the system of capitalistic production, and therefore the theory of value becomes the dominant feature of his economics and the point of departure for the whole analysis, in all its voluminous ramifications. ”

“ Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. ”

“ Fighting makes for malevolence. The war is itself to be counted as a set-back. A very large proportion of those who have lived through it will necessarily carry a warlike bent through life. By that much, whatever it may count for, the decay of the dynastic spirit—or the growth of tolerance and equity in national sentiment, if one chooses to put it that way—will be retarded from beforehand. So also the Imperial establishment, or whatever is left of it, may be counted on to do everything in its power to preserve the popular spirit of loyalty and national animosity, by all means at its disposal ”

“ To any modern scientist interested in economic phenomena, the chain of cause and effect in which any given phase of human culture is involved, as well as the cumulative changes wrought in the fabric of human conduct itself by the habitual activity of mankind, are matters of more engrossing and more abiding interest than the method of inference by which an individual is presumed invariably to balance pleasure and pain under given conditions that are presumed to be normal and invariable. ”

“ It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have enforced the recognition of causal sequence in the practical contact of mankind with their environment, that men have come to systematize the phenomena of this environment and the facts of their own contact with it in terms of causal sequence. So that while the higher learning in its best development, as the perfect flower of scholasticism and classicism, was a by-product of the priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern science may be said to be a by-product of the industrial process. ”

“ To give the fullest practical effect to the patriotic fervor that animates any modern nation, and so turn it to use in the most effective way, it is necessary to show that the demands of equity are involved in the case. Any cursory survey of modern historical events bearing on this point, among the civilised peoples, will bring out the fact that no concerted and sustained movement of the national spirit can be had without enlisting the community's moral convictions. The common man must be persuaded that right is on his side. "Thrice is he armed who knows his quarrel just." ”

“ In point of fact, science gives its tone to modern culture. One may approve or one may deprecate the fact that this opaque, materialistic interpretation of things pervades modern thinking. That is a question of taste, about which there is no disputing. The prevalence of this matter-of-fact inquiry is a feature of modern culture, and the attitude which critics take toward this phenomenon is chiefly significant as indicating how far their own habit of mind coincides with the enlightened common-sense of civilised mankind. It shows in what degree they are abreast of the advance of culture. ”

“ The common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God. There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main chance ”

“ In all communities under the barbarian culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between animate and inert things. ”

“ The ancient human predilection for discovering a dramatic play of passion and intrigue in the phenomena of nature still asserts itself. In the most advanced communities, and even among the adepts of modern science, there comes up persistently the revulsion of the native savage against the inhumanly dispassionate sweep of the scientific quest, as well as against the inhumanly ruthless fabric of technological processes that have come out of this search for matter-of-fact knowledge. ”

“ It is here called "waste" because this expenditure does not serve human-life or human well-being on the whole, not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility to him, as compared with other forms of consumption that would not be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever form of expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has utility to him by virtue of his preference. ”

“ To the Physiocrats this substantial ground of economic reality is the nutritive process of Nature. To Adam Smith it is Labor. His reality has the advantage of being the deliverance of the common sense of a more modern community, and one that has maintained itself in force more widely and in better consonance with the facts of latter-day industry. The Physiocrats owe their preconception of the productiveness of nature to the habits of thought of a community in whose economic life the dominant phenomenon was the owner of agricultural land. ”

“ The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of leisure—exemption from personal contact with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the inborn dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use. ”

“ The historians of human culture have, no doubt justly, commonly dealt with the mutations that have occurred on the higher levels of intellectual enterprise, in the more ambitious, more picturesque, and less secure of these two contrasted ranges of theoretical knowledge; while the lower range of generalisations, which has to do with work-day experience, has in great part been passed over with scant ceremony as lying outside the current of ideas, and as belonging rather among the things which engage the attention than among the modes, expedients and creations of this attention itself. ”

“ In a sense which has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her sustenance,—except so far as her further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of her master. The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such consumption by others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. ”