Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

modern industrial use are of the same kind and range as those found in the neighboring countries; there is substantially nothing to distinguish the German lands from those of north Europe at large, unless it be that the resources of the country are slightly under grade in quality and slightly scant in quantity, at least as compared with the most fortunate of the neighboring countries. Again, in point of native proclivity and aptitude the German population is virtually identical with its neighbors. In respect of hereditary endowment - racial character - it is the same people as the population of the neighboring nations, - more particularly identical with the Dutch, Belgian and British. By virtue of its hybrid extraction it is, like these others, gifted with a large capacity for acquiring and turning to account a wide range of technological knowledge; and by virtue of the same hereditary bias of workmanship that animates these others it is, like its neighbors, assiduously and sagaciously addicted to industry and thrift. What chiefly distinguishes the German people from these others in this connection, and more particularly from the British, is that the Germans are new to this industrial system; and the distinctive traits of the German case are in the main traceable to this fact that they are still in their novitiate.

       When the current era in the life-history of the German people began, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Germany was far in arrears, as compared with its neighbors to the west, but more particularly as contrasted with the British. This is historical commonplace, of course. It may be taken with such allowance and qualification as may seem needful; the main fact remains, that in certain decisive, or at least substantial, respects Germany was in an anachronistic state, particularly as seen from the station occupied by the English-speaking peoples.

      There is no call to depreciate the merits of the German culture of that time in those respects in which it excelled, as there would also be no use in attempting an undervaluation of it; it is too large a fact in the heritage of mankind to suffer seriously from an assault of words. However, those genial respects in which the civilisation characteristic of Germany excelled, - in which, indeed, Germany triumphed, - were not in the line of efficiency that counted materially toward fitness for life under the scheme of things then taking shape in Europe. It may have been better or it may have been worse than what came to take its place, but in any case it was not an articulate part of the working scheme; as is proven in the sequel, which was worked out with only negligible contributions from the accumulated wisdom of the German people.

      Germany was in arrears in the industrial arts and in its political institutions, as well as in such features of its civil and domestic scheme of life as come intimately into correlation with, or under the dominant influence of, these fundamental agencies in the scheme of institutions. This is the visible difference between the case of the German and of the British peoples at the time, apart from superficial peculiarities of usage and the idly decorative elements of culture. In industrial matters Germany was still at the handicraft stage, with all that is implied in that description in the way of institutional impedimenta and meticulous standardisation of trifles. Measured by the rate of progression that had brought the English community to the point where it then stood, the German industrial system was some two and a half or three centuries in arrears - somewhere in Elizabethan times; its political system was even more archaic; and use and wont governing social relations in detail was of a character such as this economic and political situation would necessarily foster.

      The characterisation so offered applies to the industrial organisation as a balanced and comprehensive working system. It does not overlook the fact that many alien details had been intruded into this archaic system by force of Germany’s unavoidable contact with the more modern industrial communities of western Europe. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the alien elements seriously began to derange the framework of the archaic scheme.

      Politically much the same will hold, except that fewer modernisms had found their way over the frontiers in this domain, nor had such modernisms effected an equally secure and disturbing lodgment in the tissues of the body politic, Germany being still consistently organised on the pattern of the “territorial State,” - a peculiarly petty and peculiarly irresponsible autocracy, which has come to its best maturity only among the Germanic peoples, and which has held its place with remarkable tenacity within the limits of the Fatherland.

      The territorial State, or its less finished replica under another designation, has not been unknown elsewhere in the north-European country, but it passed out by obsolescence some time ago among the other north-European peoples; so that even the Scandinavian countries, which would appear by geographical necessity to have been designed for petty things, had lost this archaic fashion of state policy and political control by the time when the question of its supersession began to attract an (ineffectual) speculative interest in Germany. The territorial State is in effect a territorial aggregate, with its population, conceived as an estate belonging in usufruct to a given prince; the concept is visibly of feudal derivation, and the habit of mind which makes it a practicable form of political organisation is the feudal habit of personal subservience to a personal master. In such a polity subordination, personal allegiance, is the prime virtue, the chief condition precedent to its carrying on; while insubordination is the fatal vice, incompatible with such a coercive system.

      As seen from the standpoint of the political interests in such a State, the spirit of abnegation is by apologetic euphemism spoken of as “duty,” while insubordination is called “contumacy.” The former is the habit of mind engendered by continued and consistent suppression, and is the basis of a servile political organisation, such as the territorial State; the latter, if allowed a free course will eventuate in an anarchistic autonomy, such as appears to have been the constitution of Germanic society in the prehistoric ages before the barbarian invasions established a coercive rule in what is now the Fatherland. The latter appears to coincide with the natural bent of these peoples; but the former has that secure hold on their spirit that results from fifteen centuries of submission to a masterful discipline of coercion. The spirit of “duty” in these people is apparently not “nature,” in the sense of native proclivity; but it is “second nature” with the people of the Fatherland, as being the ingrained traditional attitude induced by consistent and protracted experience.

      In speaking of these things in the terms current among modern civilised men it is nearly impossible to avoid the appearance of deprecating this servile or submissive attitude of “duty”; particularly will this difficulty beset anyone using the English language, - the fringe of derogatory suggestion carried by the available words and phrases is appreciably less embarrassing, e.g., in German, although even there the commonplace vocabulary lends itself with greater facility to the dispraise of servility and irresponsible rule than to the commendation of these elements of modern patriotism. That such should be the case is doubtless due to the drift of institutional development in western Europe in modern times, which has on the whole set somewhat consistently in the direction of a gradual loosening of the grip of dynastic autocracy. This drift has perhaps not so much created or initiated the growth of an anarchistic (that is to say, non-servile) spirit, but rather has permissively harbored it, and so has allowed the native anarchistic bent of these peoples to reassert itself in a measure, by force of the indefeasible resiliency that characterises all hereditary proclivities.¹⁷

      Any, even a very cursory, scrutiny of the historical growth of free, or popular, institutions in modern Europe should satisfy all parties in interest that this growth has come about, not because the authorities vested with discretion and power have not taken thought to defeat it wherever a chance has offered, but because the conditioning circumstances have not enabled them to discourage it sufficiently. And by virtue of the close and facile communication of ideas among modern peoples the anarchistic penchant has, by channels of education and neighborly intercourse, come to infect even the subject populations of the better preserved territorial States; so that even there, under the shadow of the masterful system, the current vocabulary shows a weakness for free institutions and the masterless man.

      While the exigencies of the language, therefore, almost unavoidably give a color of deprecation to any discussion of this surviving habit of abnegation in the people of the Fatherland, there is no intention here to praise or to blame this spirit of subordination that underlies so much of German culture and German achievement. It is one of the larger factors that have gone to the creation of the modern era in that country, and this era and