Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen
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autonomy, and that within the self-sufficient neighborhood the individual is depended on wholly to take care of his own interest, with the backing of his kin and within such loose limits of tolerance as may be implied in the eventual formation of a vigilance committee in case any individual or group should develop into an insufferable public nuisance.
This civil system might be described as anarchy qualified by the common sense of a deliberative assembly that exercises no coercive control; or it might, if one’s bias leads that way, be called a democratic government, the executive power of which is in abeyance. All of which does not imply, in any degree, the absence of a legal system, of a conception of legality, or of specific, and even minute, provisions of law covering all conjunctures likely to arise in such a society.
While such a quasi-anarchistic scheme of social control resting on insubordination can be installed only on the basis of a natural propensity in its favor - an ethical or aesthetic sense of its equity - its practicability is conditioned by certain mechanical circumstances. The scheme depends on personal contact within the group, and the group over which its rule will extend must be limited by the bounds of such personal and informal contact. It is in the nature of things a neighborhood organisation, and is not applicable beyond the effectual reach of neighborhood relations. It is practicable, therefore, only so long and so far as the necessary industrial relations do not overpass the possibilities of such neighborly contact; and with any appreciable advance in the state of the industrial arts, such as will unduly increase the scale of industrial operations or of the consequent economic relations, the anarchistic scheme of society grows increasingly precarious.
Sooner or later the discrepancy grows too great, between what is mechanically practicable, or rather unavoidable, in the extension of the industrial community on the one hand, and the farthest practicable stretch of the anarchistic system of neighborly common-sense surveillance on the other hand. So that the old order is manifestly due to break down under the impact of cumulative change that entails a scale of organisation effectually exceeding the working limits of that undifferentiated consensus of sentiment that conditions its efficiency. By the same token, a people which has proved its eminent fitness for this scale and measure in the arts of life, by carrying forward a culture of this character under varying circumstances through several thousands of years, should presumably be unable to find itself equally at home under the conditions imposed by a state of the industrial arts that greatly overreaches these moderate bounds, and should so be unable, under these new conditions, to achieve anything like the same measure of cultural balance and grace, of popular comfort and content, or of wholesome commonplace fecundity.
With an advance in the industrial arts such as to require a larger material equipment, or such as will permit enterprise of a larger scope, the possessor of the requisite means comes into a position to extend his enterprise beyond the bounds within which neighborhood surveillance is effective. What he undertakes beyond these bounds does not, under the anarchistic rule, concern his neighbors who live within them. Indeed, in any enterprise outside he will have the moral support of his neighborhood group under the rule of Live and let live, since it is right and good that he should live as good him seems, so long as the traffic in which he engages does not impinge in a disastrous way on his neighbors; and in case of need he will have their active backing, to a reasonable extent, so far as the common-sense animus of group solidarity may carry them. Gain at the cost of other communities, particularly communities at a distance, and more especially such as are felt to be aliens, is not obnoxious to the standards of homebred use and wont.
At the same time such gains add to the standing of the man who makes them, as all pecuniary gains do in a culture that makes much of property. And all gains coming to any of its members from outside are felt to be gain to the community, by award of the uncritical but ubiquitous sense of group solidarity.15 The good repute and the added power to be gained by such enterprise acts as an incentive to its pursuit on the one hand and as a sanction to the practice on the other hand; until it becomes a commonplace of use and wont that the competitive pursuit of gain by the use of all available means is an inalienable right, and that gain at the cost of outsiders is more to be commended than serviceability to the home community. By some obscure trick of psychological sophistry that is explicable in perspicuous analysis neither for prehistoric nor for historical times, but that is well authenticated by ancient and modern usage and that may be rated as an hereditary infirmity or an hereditary advantage, the sense of group solidarity coalesces with the pride of achievement to such effect that the members of the group at large are elated with the exploits of any member of the group in good standing. So far will this sentimental sophistry carry, that the community not only looks with approval and elation on the successful self-aggrandisement of a given individual member at the cost of outsiders, but it will also unreflectingly further such enterprises at a palpable cost to itself and with the certainty of getting no gain from the venture, - as, e.g., in exploits of loyalty.
So it is quite safe to say not only that the citizens in the small-scale kingdoms of the Old Order had no material interest in extending the boundaries of the realm, or in adding a second kingdom to the patrimony of their prince, but that, on the contrary, their interest palpably lay in avoiding any such outcome. By sound logic they should have taken measures to defeat the ambitions of the crown; whereas in point of fact they went to considerable lengths to further such projects of dynastic aggrandisement. Such, of course, has also been the history of dynastic war and politics ever since. The claims and perquisites of the prince appear under the old order of petty neighborhood kingdoms to have been extremely slight and irregular; but so soon as the king’s dominions increased to such a size as to take him personally out of range of an effectual surveillance by neighborly sentiment - that is to say, so soon as the realm increased beyond the extent of a single rounded neighborhood - the crown would be able to use the loyalty of one neighborhood in enforcing exactions from another, and the royal power would then presently find no other obstacle to its continued growth than the limit placed upon it by the state of the industrial arts. This limit was determined primarily by the disposable means of communication, and secondarily by the productive efficiency of the community on which the crown drew for the supplies of men and means consumed in extending and controlling his wider dominions. Habituation, enforced and authenticated by the royal countenance, engendered the virtue of loyalty; until in the end - the end of the Old Order - the rule of Live and let live passed over into the rule that the king is to live as good him seems and the common man is to live as the king of his grace will grant him. The predisposition to group solidarity coalesced with the bias of approval for the aggrandisement of their accredited spokesman, to such effect that abnegation in his favor became the prime virtue of the new order, in place of the insubordination and initiative which, together with a neighborly tolerance, had formed the pillars of the house under the old.
Enterprise at this point appears to have followed two main lines, distinct but both leading in the end to much the same outcome: (a) local kings set about extending their dominions, displacing and disinheriting such royal lines as fell short in the struggle for empire, and imposing a more despotic rule on the communities that so coalesced into a larger realm; (b) restless young men, and older men to whom the increasing pressure of royalty was intolerable, set out in companies at adventure, fought their way to a new footing outside or ran to waste in the turmoil. Those bands of marauders that overran and subjugated what is now the Fatherland appear to have been of this class. An occasional one of these hordes, as, e.g., the Heruli, may have been led by some scion of royalty; though such appears commonly not to have been the case. But in any case the outcome is much the same, in that the old order of quasi-anarchistic autonomy presently gave place to irresponsible authority and subjection.
Chapter III.
The Dynastic State
What befel the Germanic peoples through the ages that lie between prehistoric paganism and the late-modern period, whether within their ancient habitat on the Baltic seaboard, or abroad in those seats of conquest and immigration that have since come to be spoken of as the Fatherland, - all that does not concern this inquiry. Just as the particular fortunes of these peoples in prehistoric antiquity have also no interest in this connection,