Review of Veblen’s 'AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF PEACE ...'
By Max Sylvius Handman.

The Dial. A fortnightly Journal of Criticism, Discussion, and Information
Chicago. The Dial publishing Co.
Vol. LXII (January 11 to June 14, 1917)

June 14, 1917; pp. 514-515
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[514]
Some Fundamentals of Peace

AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION.
By Thorstein Veblen. (Macmillan Co.; $2.)

Critics of the work of Mr. Thorstein Veblen have found fault with him for 
treating the social problems with which he concerns himself in the impersonal 
and detached way in which he does. They have asked him to leave the rarified 
atmosphere of scientific dispassionateness and come down into the arena, where 
the fighting is done, and tell us what to do about it and how to do it. Mr. 
Veblen, however, has persistently refused to forsake his scientific 
objectivity and has continued to handle society, particularly in its economic 
aspects, as a question to be understood rather than to become excited and 
inflamed over.

If Mr. Veblen's critics interpret his dispassionateness as indifference, they 
have been indifferent readers of his works. No man who has spent a lifetime 
studying and describing society can be said not to care about the humanity of 
the thing which he has so intimately made his own. In fact, the economic 
aspect of social activity is about the last field imaginable where one can 
rest satisfied with a mere analysis or statement of how the bug buzzes. Mr. 
Veblen is interested, intensely interested, in what is to-day rather smugly 
called social welfare. That he has not felt it incumbent upon him to indulge 
in advice and exhortation is perhaps due, on the one hand, to the fact that he 
saw no particular scarcity of that commodity, and on the other, to the 
preconception on which his scheme of social psychology may be said to rest.

This preconception runs to the effect that taking thought has so far not 
succeeded in deviating the workaday habits of any community from idiotic 
activities or imbecile preoccupations. Such taking thought is only a half-
hearted affair at best, surrounded as it is by the terribly heavy and 
intricate mass of former and present thoughts derived from the manner in which 
the daily work of the world is carried on. Since one's habits of mind are so 
intimately determined by one's habits of work, work in the large sense of the 
activities connected with daily living and dying, advice and exhortation would 
be simply in the nature of homiletic supererogation, useful for the purpose of 
emotional diffusion or aesthetic complaisance.

The situation is different in a crisis, such as the present war may be said to 
have produced. The ordinary ways of living and dying have been wrenched from 
their moorings and the ordinary habits of thought are found to be wanting in 
their old-time comforts and stability. Taking thought is conceivably more 
likely now to result in a way of living in accord with that thought than ever 
before. Or to put it more as Mr. Veblen presents it, taking thought may result 
in the abolition of a part or the whole of that system of organized and 
revered nuisances which makes up so much of our institutional scheme of mental 
habituation.

For so Mr. Veblen views the nature of peace and the means of its perpetuation. 
To him, peace is less in the nature of something to be established than of 
something not to be disturbed. An inquiry into the nature of peace would, 
therefore, reduce itself to an inquiry into the agencies calculated or not 
calculated to interfere with the established peace.

Assuming that our voluble professions of pacific intentions are to be taken 
seriously, Mr. Veblen presents a few propositions which he believes will make 
for peace, in case the situation at the end of the war is of a character to 
make possible the establishment of an order opposed to disturbance of the 
peace. These propositions assume the existence of a league of nations, 
something on the order of the much-heralded League to Enforce Peace. The 
propositions are:

(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial (German) establishment, 
together with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the 
Empire and the privileged classes;

(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval, 
defensive and offensive;

(3) Cancelment of the public debt of the Empire and of its members creditors 
of the Empire being accounted accessory to the culpable enterprise of the 
Imperial government;

(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have 
contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;

(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred by the Entente 
belligerents or by neutrals for the prosecution or by reason of the war, and 
distribution of the obligation so assumed impartially among the members of the 
league, including the peoples of the defeated nations;

(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded 
territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by confiscation 
of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a certain very modest 
maximum, calculated on the average of property owned, say, by the poorer 
three-fourths of the population, the kept classes being properly accounted 
accessory to the Empire's culpable enterprise.

It will be seen at once that Mr. Veblen assumes the defeat of the German 
Imperial power as a necessary condition for any but a German peace. The reason 
for such an assumption is found in the very character of any Imperial power, 
the tendency to war, dominion, and exploitation being its "original nature." 
[515] As long as such an Imperial power is running around loose, there is 
absolutely no chance for any peace except on terms dictated by that Imperial 
power a Pax Germanica on the order and analogy of the ancient Pax Romana. Mr. 
Veblen discusses at length the contingency of a "peace without honor," and he 
concludes that, while biologically such a peace is no more an obstacle to 
useful, decent, and upright living than the system of balances of power under 
which we live at present, the ordinary man is altogether too patriotic, too 
much imbued with "a sense of partisan solidarity in respect of prestige," to 
tolerate any such violent damage to his feelings of respect for tribal 
precedence and decorum.

There remains a third alternative. If the dynastic busybodies who run the 
business of Imperialistic expansion by means of death and destruction can be 
put out of that business, if the devoted loyalty of the rank and file of 
Imperial subjects can ever be made amenable to a sense of the discrepancy 
between that loyalty and its corresponding cost in life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness, then the Imperial show will have to be closed down and 
the danger of disturbance of the peace will be diminished by that much. Mr. 
Veblen has no illusions on that score. Habits are slowly learned and slowly 
unlearned not so slowly unlearned, perhaps, but slowly enough. Still, the 
thing can be done by following a policy of thorough neutralization and 
stubborn refusal to take the host of genteel military and bureaucratic 
parasites at their own valuation.

While the Imperial establishment is by far the most gifted with potentialities 
for disturbing the peace, the so-called constitutional monarchies are not 
altogether slackers in that respect. Wherever there is a system of 
hierarchically graded men, there peace trembles in the balance. To the extent 
that this grading system has a basis in the affections of the common man, to 
that extent is a weapon placed in the hands of the irresponsible, which they 
can, and which they usually do, use for their God, their King, and their 
country different names for their own predilections.

Lastly, one must not exclude from the list of the potential trouble-makers the 
so-called republics by the grace of the business man. They also share, and 
share richly, in that potentiality. Under modern conditions of financial 
investment, when God, King, and country are transformed into national honor at 
so much per cent, it is to be expected that the peace will be disturbed as 
often and as much as the single-minded and single-hearted purpose of financial 
returns demands such a procedure.

The crucial factor in this disturbance of the peace by these various, 
variously ill-meaning agencies, is, after all, the system of tribal loyalties 
and habits, of tribal animosities and pugnacities which make up the essence of 
patriotism. It is on the basis of these that the knight-errant in search of 
adventure and the knight-investor in search of dividends construct their 
schemes of assault and battery known as national expansion. This feeling of 
patriotic devotion is given due treatment by Mr. Veblen. He finds democracy 
not lacking in such feeling and mankind indifferently and abundantly provided 
with it. With it also he finds that the system of mechanical habits of work 
and thought which characterizes the modern machine process makes for an 
insubordination necessary to the ultimate defeat of that feeling. In this 
respect warlike organizations find themselves in the dilemma brought about by 
the modern industrial revolution. They cannot successfully prosecute their 
wars without the products of the machine process, modern warfare being 
altogether a question of mechanical and industrial technique, and, in the long 
run, they cannot get along with it. In the last analysis, Mr. Veblen bases his 
hope for peace on the foundation of the revolution in mental habits which goes 
with the machine process.

Such, in the barest outline, is Mr. Veblen's analysis of the factors which 
make for or against peace. It is an analysis not written for the man who wants 
to read while he runs. None of Mr. Veblen's works were written with such 
readers in view. If the subject is worth writing a book about, it is also 
worthy of a book that must be read with thought and consideration. Mr. 
Veblen's great care in expressing his thoughts may mislead some into believing 
him difficult of access. This is not the case, except for the man who wants to 
get the greatest immediate returns for the least effort. Mr. Veblen's manner 
of writing is symphonic; what he repeats is not repetition in the common sense 
of the word; no idea is quite the same after he has stated it twice or even 
three times. The theme may be the same, but the complex working out of the 
theme gives it the value of an entirely new composition. Above all there 
stands a masterly intellect, holding the various strands of fact and thought 
securely in its grasp and weaving them into patterns of compelling truth.

MAX SYLVIUS HANDMAN.

NOTE from 'The Dial', June 14, 1917; p. 537:
Max Sylvius Handman was formerly a member of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the University of Missouri. He was educated at Columbia and abroad, and he has had the benefit of long association with Professor Veblen.
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