Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

as the shifting progression of usages in sepulture in the remoter past argues that these peoples were not above learning from their neighbors, or perhaps rather were temperamentally defenseless against in-novation from the outside. In the late pagan era they seem, e.g., to have borrowed, and in some degree made over, several deities of foreign extraction; and it may be recalled that the pagan era closes with the wholesale acceptance of an alien mythology and religious scheme, the improvement and adaptation of which to their own temperamental needs has occupied much of the serious attention of these peoples ever since.

      None of this extensive and unremitting draught on the technological and institutional resources of other cultural regions can be called an idle borrowing. The borrowed elements have invariably been assimilated, drawn into the cultural system and so combined and shaped to its purpose as to have led to an unbroken evolution of a scheme peculiar to these (hybrid) peoples and their needs, rather than to the substitution of a scheme from outside or a piecing-out of the scheme of things into which it is intruded. In other words, the borrowing has been done in a thoroughly workmanlike manner and with a free hand.

      This proclivity to borrow, and the free and easy efficiency with which borrowed elements are turned to account, is a characteristic trait of north-European antiquity, as, indeed, it is still something of a distinctive mark of these peoples. It probably marks a temperamental bent of the north-European population, at the same time that it gives a certain characteristic flexibility to their scheme of institutions. As a temperamental trait it would appear to be traceable, at least in good part, to the fact of their hybrid extraction; possibly also in part to the peculiar race characteristics of the stocks from which this hybrid population is derived.⁷ The efficacy of borrowing that so comes to light in the life-history of the Baltic culture, as also in a less notorious manner in other instances of cultural intercourse, puts up to the student of institutions a perplexing question, or rather a group of perplexing questions. Something has just been said on the question of why one people borrows elements of culture or of technology with greater facility and effect than another. But the larger question stands untouched: Why do the borrowed elements lend themselves with greater facility and effect to their intrinsic use in the hands of the borrower people than in the hands of the people to whose initiative they are due? Why are borrowed elements of culture more efficiently employed than home-grown innovations? or more so than the same elements at the hands of their originators? It would of course be quite bootless to claim that such is always or necessarily the case, but it is likewise not to be denied that, as a matter of history, technological innovations and creations of an institutional nature have in many cases reached their fullest serviceability only at the hands of other communities and other peoples than those to whom these cultural elements owed their origin and initial success. That such should ever be the case is a sufficiently striking phenomenon, - one might even say a sufficiently striking discrepancy.

      An explanation, good as far as it goes, though it may not go all the way, is to be looked for in the peculiar circumstances attending the growth, as well as the eventual transmission by borrowing, of any article of the institutional equipment. Technological elements affecting the state of the industrial arts, as being the more concrete and more tangible, will best serve to demonstrate the proposition. Any far-reaching innovation or invention, such as may eventually find a substantial place in the inventory of borrowed elements, will necessarily begin in a small way, finding its way into use and wont among the people where it takes its rise rather tentatively and by tolerance than with a sweeping acceptance and an adequate realisation of its uses and ulterior consequences.

      Such will have been the case, e.g., with the domestication of the crop plants and the beginnings of tillage, or the domestication of the useful animals, or the use of the metals, or, again, with the rise of the handicraft system, or the industrial revolution that brought in the machine industry. The innovation finds its way into the system of use and wont at the cost of some derangement to the system, provokes to new usages, conventions, beliefs, and principles of conduct, in part directed advisedly to its utilisation or to the mitigation of its immediate consequences, or to the diversion of its usufruct to the benefit of given individuals or classes; but in part there also grow up new habits of thought due to the innovation which it brings into the routine of life, directly in the way of new requirements of manipulation, surveillance, attendance or seasonal time-schedule, and indirectly by affecting the economic relations between classes and localities, as well as the distribution and perhaps the aggregate supply of consumable wealth.

      In the early times, such as would come immediately in question here, it is a virtual matter-of-course that any material innovation, or indeed any appreciable unit of technological ways and means, will be attended with a fringe of magical or superstitious conceits and observances. The evidences of this are to be found in good plenty in all cultures, ancient or contemporary, on the savage and barbarian levels; and indeed they are not altogether wanting in civilised life.

      Many students of ethnology, folk-psychology and religion have busied themselves to good effect with collecting and analysing such material afforded by magical and superstitious practice, and in most instances they are able to trace these practices to some ground of putative utility, connecting them with the serviceable working of the arts of life at one point or another, or with the maintenance of conditions conducive to life and welfare in some essential respect. Where the ethnologist is unable to find such a line of logical connection between superstitious practice and the exigencies of life and welfare, he commonly considers that he has not been able to find what is in the premises, not that the premises do not contain anything of the kind he is bound to expect. But if magical and superstitious practices, or such of them as are at all of material consequence, are with virtual universality to be traced back through the channels of habituation to some putative ground of serviceability for human use, it follows that the rule should work, passably at least, the other way; that the state of the industrial arts which serve human use in such a culture will be shot through with magical and superstitious conceits and observances having an indispensable but wholly putative efficacy.

      In many of the lower cultures, or perhaps rather in such of the lower cultures as are at all well known, the workday routine of getting a living is encumbered with a ubiquitous and pervasive scheme of such magical or superstitious conceits and observances, which are felt to constitute an indispensable part of the industrial processes in which they mingle. They embody the putatively efficacious immaterial constituent of all technological procedure; or, seen in detail, they are the spiritual half that completes and animates any process or device throughout its participation in the industrial routine. Like the technological elements with which they are associated, and concomitantly with them, these magically efficacious devices have grown into the prevalent habits of thought of the population and have become an integral part of the common-sense notion of how these technological elements are and are to be turned to account.⁸ And at a slightly farther shift in the current of sophistication, out of the same penchant for anthropomorphic interpretation and analogy, a wide range of religious observances, properly so called, will also presently come to bear on the industrial process and the routine of economic life; with a proliferous growth of ceremonial, of propitiation and avoidance, designed to further the propitious course of things to be done.

      These matters of the magical and religious ritual of industry and economic arrangements among the peoples of the lower cultures are sufficiently familiar to all ethnological students, and probably they also are so far a matter of common notoriety that there is no need of insistence on their place and value in these lower cultures. They are spoken of here only to recall the fact that the large and consequential technological elements involved in any primitive system of industry have commonly carried such a fringe of putatively efficacious, though mechanically futile, waste motion. These naive forms of mandatory futility are believed to belong only on the lower levels of culture, although it should not be overlooked that magical and religious conceits still exercise something of an inhibitory influence in the affairs of industry even among the very enlightened peoples of Christendom.

      But aside from these simple-minded institutional inhibitions on industrial efficiency that seem so much a matter of course in the lower cultures, there are others that run to much the same effect and hold their place among the more enlightened peoples in much the same matter-of-course way. These are in part rather obscure, not having been much attended to in popular speculation, and in