Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen
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is in large part a difference in form and in administrative machinery; it does not greatly circumscribe the effectual powers, rights and discretion of the Imperial crown; still less does it seriously limit the powers of the Prussian crown, or the dynastic claims of suzerainty vested in the Prussian succession. Even under the constitution it is a government resting on the suzerainty of the crown, not on the discretion of a parliamentary body.
It is, in other words, a government of constitutionally mitigated absolutism, not of parliamentary discretion tempered with monarchy.
In the shift from particularism to the Empire no revolutionary move was made, comparable with the change initiated in the United Kingdom by the revolution of 1688; if such a shift to a democratic constitution is to overtake the German State, that move lies still in the future. The changes introduced with the constitution of the Empire, in so far as they have been effectual, were such as were made necessary by the larger scale on which the new national jurisdiction was required to work, and involved only such a modicum of delegated jurisdiction to parliamentary and local organisations as would be expedient for the control and usufruct of territory and resources, population, trade and industry, that exceed the effectual reach of the simpler bureaucracy characteristic of the small territorial State. The economic policy of the Imperial era has still continued to be a “cameralistic” policy, with such concessive adaptations as the modern scale and complexity of economic affairs necessitate. It is true, under the administration of Bismarck there was a perceptible drift in the direction of those “liberal” preconceptions that subconsciously biassed the endeavors of all European statesmen through much of the latter half of the century; but this drift, which showed itself in the Bismarckian policies of trade, colonies, and incipient ministerial responsibility, never came to anything conclusive under his hands; nor had it gone so far as in any appreciable degree to embarrass the endeavors of the later emperor, directed to the complete revendication of the Imperial suzerainty. The paramount authority, under the Imperial constitution, vests in the crown, not in any representative body, although this holds with even less qualification in the Prussian than in the Imperial government; but Germany has, in these respects, been progressively “Prussianised” during the Imperial era, while Prussia has not been drawing toward the lines of that democratic autonomy that holds the rest of north and central Europe, at least on a qualified and provisional tenure.
Imperial Germany does not depart sensibly from the pattern of Prussia under Frederick the Great, in respect of its national policies or the aims and methods of government control, nor do the preconceptions of its statesmen differ at all widely from those prevalent among the dynastic jobbers of that predaceous era of state-making. The difference touches mainly the machinery of politics and administration, and it is mainly of such a character as is dictated by an endeavor to turn the results of modern industry and commerce to account for the purposes that once seemed good to the pragmatists of that earlier era.
That such is the case need give no occasion for dispraise. At least there is nothing of the kind implied here. It may be an untoward state of things, perhaps, though sufficient proof of such a contention has not yet come in sight.
It is specifically called to mind here because it is one of the main factors in the case of Imperial Germany considered as a phase of the development of institutions within the Western culture.
This modern state of the industrial arts that so has led to the rehabilitation of a dynastic State in Germany on a scale exceeding what had been practicable in earlier times, - this technological advance was not made in Germany but was borrowed, directly or at the second remove, from the English-speaking peoples; primarily, and in the last resort almost wholly, from England. What has been insisted on above is that British use and wont in other than the technological respect was not taken over by the German community at the same time. The result being that Germany offers what is by contrast with England an anomaly, in that it shows the working of the modern state of the industrial arts as worked out by the English, but without the characteristic range of institutions and convictions that have grown up among English-speaking peoples concomitantly with the growth of this modern state of the industrial arts.
Germany combines the results of English experience in the development of modern technology with a state of the other arts of life more nearly equivalent to what prevailed in England before the modern industrial régime came on; so that the German people have been enabled to take up the technological heritage of the English without having paid for it in the habits of thought, the use and wont, induced in the English community by the experience involved in achieving it. Modern technology has come to the Germans ready-made, without the cultural consequences which its gradual development and continued use has entailed among the people whose experience initiated it and determined the course of its development.
The position of the Germans is not precisely unique in this respect; in a degree the same general proposition will apply to the other Western nations,22 but it applies to none with anything like the same breadth. The case of Germany is unexampled among Western nations both as regards the abruptness, thoroughness and amplitude of its appropriation of this technology, and as regards the archaism of its cultural furniture at the date of this appropriation.
It will be in place to call to mind, in this connection, what has been said in an earlier chapter on the advantage of borrowing the technological arts rather than developing them by home growth. In the transit from one community to another the technological elements so borrowed do not carry over the fringe of other cultural elements that have grown up about them in the course of their development and use. The new expedients come to hand stripped of whatever has only a putative or conventional bearing on their use. On the lower levels of culture this fringe of conventional or putative exactions bound up with the usufruct of given technological devices would be mainly of the nature of magical or religious observances; but on the higher levels, in cases of the class here in question, they are more likely to be conventionalities embedded in custom and to some extent in law, of a secular kind, but frequently approaching the mandatory character of religious observances, as, e.g., the requirement of a decently expensive standard of living.
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