Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen
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have to count with whatever strength or weakness this animus of feudalism contributes to the outcome. Now, it happens that this surviving feudalistic animus of fealty and subservience has visibly been a source of strength to the German State hitherto; as it presumably also has to the economic system, apart from the political ends to be served by the community’s economic efficiency. This is to be recognised and taken account of quite apart from any question as to the ultimate merits of such a popular temper in any other connection, or even as to its ulterior value for the ends of the State. For all that concerns the present inquiry it may or may not appear, as doubtless would appear to the mind of most English-speaking persons, that this spirit of subservient alacrity on which the Prussian system of administrative efficiency rests is beneath the human dignity of a free man; that it is the spirit of a subject, not of a citizen; that except for dynastic uses it is a defect and a delinquency; and that in the end the exigencies of civilised life will not tolerate such an anachronistic remnant of medićvalism, and the habit of it will be lost. For all that can be made to appear today, it may also be true that it has only a transient value even for the uses of the dynastic State; but all that does not derange the fact that hitherto it has visibly been a source of strength to the German State, and presumably to the German people at large as an economic body.
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century there began a complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation in German affairs. At least on its face this movement is primarily of an economic character, the immediate provo-cation to practical activity being the needs of trade and of the princely exchequers.
Much genial speculation, of an academic kind, and much edifying popular exposition and agitation of national ideals ran along beside these practical measures, and this intellectual and spiritual disturbance may have had more or less to do with the measures taken and with the general drift of national policy. It is not easy to say whether this spiritual disturbance is to be rated as a cause or a concomitant of the practical changes going forward during this period, but it should seem reasonable to give it place on both of these grounds.
The fashion among historians of the period, particularly among patriotic historians, has been to construe this complex movement of forces, material and immaterial, that makes German history through the middle half of the century, as a movement of the German spirit, initiated by the exuberant national genius of the race. Such is the tradition, but the tradition comes out of the Romantic era; out of which no tradition of a more matter-of-fact character could conceivably come.
A matter-of-fact view of such an historical movement will necessarily look to the factors which may have had a part in shaping habits of thought at the time, and here there are only two lines of derivation to which the analysis can securely run back, - discounting, as is the current fashion, any occult agencies, such as manifest destiny, national genius, Providential guidance, and the like. There is no call to undervalue these occult agencies, of course; but granting that these and their like are the hidden springs, it is also to be called to mind that it is their nature to remain hidden, and that the tangible agencies through which these presumed hidden prime movers work must therefore be sufficient for the work without recourse to the hidden springs; which can have an effect only by force of a magical efficacy. Their relation to the course of events is of the nature of occult or magical efficacy, not of causal efficiency; and under the modern materialistic prejudice in these matters of scientific inquiry, the causal sequence in which an explanation of events is sought must be complete in all elements that touch the motivation and the outcome, without drawing on any but tangible fact, on matters that are of the nature of “data.” To the modern preconception in favor of efficient cause, as contrasted with the Romantic postulate of efficacious guidance, any attempt to set up a logical finality in any terms other than matter-of-fact is quite nugatory. It may be a genial work of futility, and it may have its value as dramatic art or homiletical discourse; but in the house of scientific inquiry such premises, and generalisations in such terms, are but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
There are two lines of agency visibly at work shaping the habits of thought of the people in the complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation spoken of above. These are the received scheme of use and wont, and the new state of the industrial arts; and it is not difficult to see that it is the latter that makes for readjustment; nor should it be any more difficult to see that the readjustment is necessarily made under the surveillance of the received scheme of use and wont. The latter is modified in the course of this new range of habituation enforced by the new state of the industrial arts, but the changes taking place in use and wont are, here as elsewhere, made in the way of tardy concession under the impact of exigencies that will tangibly not tolerate usage that has passed out of date.
The complex movement in question is a movement of readjustment in the arts of life to meet the requirements of new technological conditions, and of rehabilitation of the received scheme of princely policy to make it workable under the new technological conditions. The changes which appear in the outcome, therefore, come about on the initiative of the new technological advance, and by expedient concessions and shrewd endeavors on the part of the constituted authority to turn the new-won efficiency to use for its own ends; the conscious directive management in the case being under the hands of the governmental organisation and directed to such a rehabilitation of the territorial State as would enable it to do business on the increased scale imposed by the new state of the industrial arts, and adequately to handle the forces which the new industrial system so placed at its disposal.
Much had already been done during the preceding hundred years to take advantage of technological improvements, so far as these improvements contributed directly to the military strength of the prince, and much had been done, incidentally to the extension of territorial control and of fiscal administration, in the way of improved means of communication and intercourse; but the modern industrial system, as such, and except as an outside and essentially alien factor, had not seriously touched the German popu-lation, particularly not those Prussian dominions which take the central place in the rehabilitation of Germany in the nineteenth century. But the industrial state of Germany was after all medićval rather than modern, and the state of the industrial arts, therefore, still continued, on the whole, favorable to the maintenance of the old régime; particularly since this old régime was securely lodged in the interests and traditional ideals of the dynastic rulers and of the privileged classes.
There is a side line of influence from the technological side in the growth of German culture prior to its modernisation, which requires to be noted in any attempt to realise what has taken place in the unfolding of the modern era. The art of printing and the consequent use of printed matter had always been at home among the German people, ever since that technological advance first was made.
From the outset and down into the nineteenth century the printer’s art was a handicraft process, and was well developed in Germany. But the institutional consequences, the effect on use and wont, of the habit of consuming printed matter need not therefore be of the handicraft order. A free consumption of printed matter means a free intercourse of ideas, and it therefore entails an exposure of the consumers to contact with ideas current beyond the circle of their immediate personal contact.
The habitual consumption of print has much the same order of disciplinary effect as habituation to the wide-reaching standardisation of the arts of life brought on by the machine industry; but it goes without saying that the effect so wrought by the use of print will not extend much beyond the class of persons addicted to it; the illiterate, and the classes who make little use of print anyway, will not be seriously or extensively disturbed, - what may be called the extravasation of printed literature is not a matter of large consequence, although it is not to be denied that the diffusion of ideas conveyed by print, among the illiterate, will always amount to something. Whereas the disciplinary value of life under the standardising régime of the machine industry touches the illiterate perhaps more immediately and intimately, and almost as comprehensively, as it touches the classes who habitually read.
It is worth noting in this immediate connection, although it is also a proposition of general validity, that in the nature of the case no profound or massive revolutionary disturbance of the established order, in any respect, can be carried through by the medium of printed matter alone, or in the absence of other, materially more exacting and peremptory, factors of habituation working to the same general effect.