Thorstein Veblen

“ 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.” ”

“ There is, indeed, a curiously pervasive concomitance, in point of time, place, and race, between the modern machine technology, the material sciences, religious scepticism, and that spirit of insubordination that makes the substance of what are called free or popular institutions. On none of these heads is the concomitance so close or consistent as to warrant the conclusion that race and topography alone have made this modern cultural outcome. ”

“ To the creative workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his work. ”

“ It is a distinctive mark of mankind that the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by the other animals. But the dependence of the race on its endowment of instincts is no less absolute for this intervention of intelligence; since it is only by the prompting of instinct that reflection and deliberation come to be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope and method of intelligence in all this employment of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Initially, it seems, the point of interest, and indeed of contention, was the freedom of the masterless workman to dispose of his person and workmanship as he saw fit and as he best could and would,—to take care of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness without let or hindrance from persons vested with authority or prerogative. ”

“ Efficiency conduces to the common good, and is also a meritorious and commendable trait in the person who exercises it. But under the canons of self-help and pecuniary valuation the test of efficiency in economic matters has come to be, not technological mastery and productive effect, but proficiency in pecuniary management and the acquisition of wealth. Both in his own estimation and in the eyes of his fellows, the man who gains much does well; he is conceived to do well both as a matter of personal efficiency and in point of serviceability to the common good. ”

“ And no modern civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability as not to recognise off-hand that the first category is meritorious and the last discreditable, whatever his individual prejudices may lead him to think of the second. Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without predatory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic class loses its pecuniary advantage it becomes questionable. A poverty-stricken aristocrat is a “decayed gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a disingenuous figure of speech. ”

“ The Order of Nature, with its scheme of Natural Law, is felt as the work of a consummately skilful and ingenious workmanlike agency that looks to a serviceable end to be accomplished; and the profoundly thoughtful scientific inquiry of that time harbours no doubt that this workmanlike agency of Nature at large rules the world of visible fact and will achieve its good work in good time. ”

“ The ordinary routine of life is more widely and pervasively determined by the machine industry and by machine-like industrial processes today, and this determination is at the same time more rigorous, than any analogous effect that was had under the handicraft system. Within the effective bounds of modern Christendom no one can wholly escape or in any sensible degree deflect the sweep of the machine’s routine.
Modern life goes by clockwork. ”

“ But throughout the era of handicraft there continued also to be devoutly held the postulate that the material universe had a beginning in an act of creation, as also that it would some day come to an end, a quantitative collapse. As the era of handicraft advanced and, apparently, as the discipline of life under that technology enforced the habitual acceptance of the proposition that the quantity of material fact is constant, much ingenuity and much ambiguous speech was spent in an endeavour to reconcile the mechanical efficiency of the creative fiat with the dictum, ex nihilo nihil fit. ”

“ Changes are going forward constantly and incontinently in the institutional apparatus, the habitual scheme of rules and principles that regulate the community’s life, and not least in the technological ways and means by which the life of the race and its state of culture are maintained; but changes come rarely—in effect not at all—in the endowment of instincts whereby mankind is enabled to employ these means and to live under the institutions which its habits of life have cumulatively created. ”

“ The scheme of Natural Rights, and of Natural Liberty, which so emerges is of a pronounced individualistic tenor, as it should be to answer to the scheme of experience embodied in the system of handicraft. In the crafts, particularly during the protracted early phases of the system, it is the individual workman, working for a livelihood by use of his own personal force, dexterity and diligence, that stands out as the main fact; so much so, indeed, that he appears to have stood, in the apprehension of his time, as the sole substantial factor in the industrial organisation. ”

“ Meantime the workmen of all kinds and grades—labourers, mechanics, operatives, engineers, experts—all imbued with the same pecuniary principles of efficiency, go about their work with more than half an eye to the pecuniary advantage of what they have in hand. The attitude of the trades-unions towards their work and towards the industrial concerns in whose employ their work is done illustrates something of the habitual frame of mind of these men, who are avowed experts in the matter of workmanship. ”

“ In the main, the state of the industrial arts is always a heritage out of the past; it is always in process of change, perhaps, but the substantial body of it is knowledge that has come down from earlier generations. New elements of insight and proficiency are continually being added and worked into this common stock by the experience and initiative of the current generation, but such novel elements are always and everywhere slight and inconsequential in comparison with the body of technology that has been carried over from the past. ”

“ To the inquiring minds of that era it is a matter of course and of common sense that the forces of Nature are seen to work out the effects which emerge before their eyes. What they see in fact may be, as the modern psychologists would perhaps say, a certain concomitance and sequence in the observed phenomena; but what those observers see in effect is always a certain cause working out a certain effect. The imputation of causal efficiency to the observed phenomena is so thoroughly a matter of course that there is no sense of imputation in the observer’s mind. ”

“ Not only are the tenets of magic and theology at variance with the proposition that action can take place only by mechanical contact; but in the naïve thinking of commonplace humanity outside this machine-made Western civilisation, action at a distance is patently neither imbecile nor incomprehensible as a familiar trait of external objects in their everyday behaviour. ”

“ So soon as the petty trade has grown to effective dimensions the individual workman comes into somewhat direct relations with the market, and except for the collective interest and action embodied in the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in little else than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow craftsmen or to the community. It is the place of each to gain a livelihood by honest work through his own individual skill and enterprise. ”

“ The view here spoken for, that the modern businessman is necessarily out of effectual touch with the affairs of technology as such and incompetent to exercise an effectual surveillance of the processes of industry, is not a matter of bias or of vague opinion; it has in fact become a matter of statistical demonstration. Even a cursory survey of the current achievements of these great modern industries as managed by businessmen, taken in contrast with the opportunities offered them, should convince anyone of the technological unfitness of this business management of industry. ”

“ The instinct of workmanship brought the life of mankind from the brute to the human plane, and in all the later growth of culture it has never ceased to pervade the works of man. But the extensive complication of circumstances and the altered outlook of succeeding generations, brought on by the growth of institutions and the accumulation of knowledge, have led to an extension of its scope and of its canons and logic to activities and conjunctures that have little traceable bearing on the means of subsistence. ”

“ The common stock of technological knowledge underlying all special training was at that time still a sufficiently simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily acquired in the routine of work, without formal application to the learning of it; and any indebtedness to the community at large or to past generations for such common stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s naïve appraisal of his productive capacity in the simple and complacent terms of his own person. ”

“ This attempted characterisation of modern scientific inquiry and its working concepts applies immediately to the earlier phases and down to a date well past the advent of the machine industry,—so far past that date as to allow time and experience to work the new habits of thought peculiar to the machine technology into the texture of men’s preconceptions. In time, but tardily, as is the case with the pervasive effects of any new line of habituation, the discipline of the machine has wrought a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive, change in the aims and methods of science ”

“ This technological infirmity of the businessmen assuredly does not arise from a lack of interest in industry, since it is only out of the net product of industry that the business community’s gains are drawn—except so far as they are substantially gains of accountancy merely, due to an inflation of values. Perhaps no class of men have ever been more keenly alert in their interest in industrial matters than the modern businessmen ”

“ It happened in Europe, as it has happened now and again elsewhere, that the ownership of the soil in advanced feudal times took shape as a Landed Interest living at peace and under settled relations with the community from which they drew their livelihood and their means of controlling the community. Under these circumstances there grew up an ever-widening industrial system, under manorial auspices, in which the foremost place is taken by the mechanic arts, in the way of specialised crafts and mechanical processes and appliances. ”

“ On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, as well as by force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, women come to take the leading rôle in the industrial community of the early time, and the community’s material interests come to centre about them and their relation to the natural products of the fields; and since this interest bears immediately on the fecundity of the flocks and crops, it is particularly in their character of motherhood that the women come most vitally into the case. ”

“ Each successive move in advance, every new wrinkle of novelty, improvement, invention, adaptation, every further detail of workmanlike innovation, is of course made by individuals and comes out of individual experience and initiative, since the generations of mankind live only in individuals. But each move so made is necessarily made by individuals immersed in the community104 and exposed to the discipline of group life as it runs in the community, since all life is necessarily group life. The phenomena of human life occur only in this form. ”

“ He or she, or rather they—for there is substantially no industry carried on in strict severalty in these communities—are productive factors or industrial agents, in the sense that they will on occasion turn out a surplus above their necessary current consumption, only because and so far as the state of the industrial arts enables them to do so. As workman, labourer, producer, breadwinner, the individual is a creature of the technological scheme; which in turn is a creation of the group life of the community. ”

“ In the course of this further elaboration of a predatory civilisation, the institutions proper to a large scale and to a powerful despotism and nobility resting on a servile people, were developed into a finished system; in which the final arbiter is always irresponsible force and in which the all-pervading social relation is personal subservience and personal authority. The mechanic arts make little if any progress under such a discipline of personalities, even the arts of war, and there is little if any evidence of sensible gain in any branch of husbandry. ”

“ So that even though the idle curiosity, like the sense of workmanship, may be momentarily thrust aside by more urgent interests, yet its long-term effects in human culture are very considerable. Men will commonly make easy terms with their curiosity when there is a call to action under the spur of a more elemental need, and even when circumstances appear to be favourable to its untroubled functioning a sustained and consistent response to its incitement is by no means an assured consequence. ”

“ The growing resort to working methods requiring organised groups of workmen together with something in the way of collective industrial plant would greatly hasten the concentration of the ownership of the material equipment. Ownership in all ages is individual ownership; and then as ever any single item of property, such as a workshop and its appliances, would presently fall into the possession of an individual owner. The owners of the plant became employers of their impecunious fellow craftsmen and so came into a position to dispose of their working capacity and their product. ”

“ Indeed, so far is the machine process from having yet recast the principles of industrial management, as distinct from technological procedure, that the efforts inspired in responsible public officials and public-spirited citizens by this patent discrepancy have hitherto been directed wholly to regulating industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme of business principles, rather than to take thought of how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution of livelihood in consonance with the technological requirements of the machine industry. ”