Thorstein Veblen
THE ARMY OF THE COMMONWEAL.

The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 2, No. 3. (Jun., 1894), pp. 456-461.
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THE ostensible purpose of the "Army of the Commonweal" has been the 
creation of a livelihood for a great number of people by means of a 
creation of employment, to be effected by a creation of capital through the 
creation of fiat money. That is to say, on the face of it, the heart of the 
"movement" is an articulate hallucination. In this its elaborate form the 
hallucination probably holds a secure lodgement only in the minds of a 
small number of people, including a large part of those who have enrolled 
themselves in the Army on ground of a serious conviction. By those who have 
sympathized with and furthered this new-fashioned excursion into the field 
of economic reform the hallucination probably is rarely harbored in this 
painstakingly [457] absurd shape. Among the common run of its sympathisers 
the sentiment with which assent is given to the demonstrations of the Army 
seems to go no farther, either in its scope or in its elaboration of 
details, than a general conviction that society owes every honest man a 
living; but a sentiment going that length certainly has obtained some 
considerable vogue. How, or under what circumstances, or precisely why 
"society" is to afford the honest man a livelihood is a thoroughly 
unprofitable question. The answer, so far, does not go much beyond the 
general proposition that it is to afford it. To the extent to which such a 
sentiment prevails, even in the vaguest form, it is certainly a 
sufficiently serious accession to the public sentiment of the community, 
and a sufficiently striking innovation in the American attitude toward 
economic questions.
No doubt much of the disturbance is due to demagogism, perhaps more is due 
to a taste for picturesque adventure and a distaste for serious application 
to unfamiliar work, and much of the countenance accorded it by outsiders 
may be less disinterested than would appear at first glance. But the 
sentiment on which it proceeds must not be conceived to be entirely, or 
even mainly spurious. The Army of the Commonweal is a new departure in 
American methods, whether it is to be considered a departure of grave 
import or not, and a new departure in any people's manner of life and of 
looking at things does not come about altogether gratuitously; there must 
be something more vital than a feigned sentiment behind it. After all 
deduction is made for the spectacular and the meretricious in this 
"movement," after allowing for the attraction which it exerts on idlers as 
a temporary means of subsistence and entertainment, and on the friends of 
humanity as a means of martyrdom, after allowing for the elements of 
blackmail and of business shrewdness in the enthusiasm with which these 
straggling bands have sometimes, especially in the middle West, been 
speeded on their way, and for the promptings of discontent that have 
mingled in the sympathy expressed by outsiders remote from the scene and 
without personal interest in the demands put forth, there is still left a 
broad substratum of honest sentiment shared in by an appreciable fraction 
of the community. What is the economic import of this sentiment?
As near as the bizarre characters in which it is written can yet be 
deciphered, the message of the Army of the Commonweal says that certain 
economic concepts are not precisely the same to many people [458] today 
that they have been to the generation which is passing. "Capital," to this 
new popular sense, is the "capital" of Karl Marx rather than that of the 
old-school economists or of the market place. The concept of "property" or 
of "ownership" is in process of acquiring a flexibility and a limitation 
that would have puzzled the good American citizen of a generation ago. By 
what amounts to a subconscious acceptance of Hegelian dialectic it has come 
about that an increase of a person's wealth, beyond a certain ill-defined 
point, should not, according to the new canon of equity, be permitted to 
increase his command over the means of production or the processes which 
those means serve. Beyond an uncertain point of aggregation, the 
inviolability of private property, in the new popular conception, declines. 
In Hegelian phrase, a change in quantity, if it is considerable enough, 
amounts to a change in kind. A man - still less a corporation - must no 
longer do what he will with his own, if what is classed as his own 
appreciably exceeds the average. It is competent for his neighbors to 
appeal for his guidance to the corporate will of the community, and ill 
default of an expression of the corporate will the neighbors in question 
may properly act vicariously for the community.
But the content of the new accession to popular sentiment is not exhausted 
by this question of detail alone. Its scope is more magnificent than petty 
property relations between one individual and the next. There is a class, 
shown by the Army of the Commonweal to be larger than was previously 
apprehended, which is, or has been, drifting away from the old-time holding 
ground of the constitution. The classic phrase is no longer to read, "life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; what is to be insured to every 
free-born American citizen under the new dispensation is "life, liberty, 
and the means of happiness." The economic significance of this change of 
attitude, if the new habit of mind should spread so far as to become the 
dominant attitude of an effective majority of the American people, is 
tremendous. It means the difference between the civil republic of the 
nineteenth century and the industrial republic of the socialists, with the 
gradual submergence of private initiative under the rising claims of 
industrial solidarity. But whether any sweeping change of this nature will, 
or can, come, is extremely doubtful. In order to a continued growth of the 
sentiment it is necessary that experience should prove the feasibility of 
paternalism, or socialism, on a scale that is not borne out by the 
experience of the past.
[459] And the appeal from individual initiative and responsibility is not 
taken to the local civil body, as would have been expected to happen if an 
analogous disturbance had occurred at any time in the past. The industrial 
solidarity that is assumed is not a solidarity and autonomy of the local 
unit. The movement does not contemplate an application of the principle of 
the town-meeting to solve an economic difficulty. It is not an appeal to 
local self-help; it is an appeal to Caesar. These individual unemployed 
men, whether out of employment by preference or by force of circumstances, 
are acting on "a wild surmise" that they individually stand in some direct, 
vital economic relation to the general government, and through the general 
government to all the rest of the community, without intermediation of any 
lower or local body. These men disregard the fact of local units and local 
relations with a facility which bespeaks their complete emancipation from 
the traditions of local self-government. If the industrial republic is to 
be floated in on the wave of sentiment which has carried the Army of the 
Commonweal, it will not be the anarchist republic of autonomous communes 
held together in a lax and dubious federation.
It may seem a sweeping generalization to say that this attitude is but an 
expression of the fact latterly emerging into popular consciousness, that 
the entire community is a single industrial organism, whose integration is 
advancing day by day, regardless of any traditional or conventional 
boundary lines or demarkations, whether between classes or between 
localities. The biologist might, perhaps, name the process "economic 
cephalization." The aberrations, in which this consciousness - or half-
consciousness - of an increasing industrial coherence is expressing itself, 
must not be allowed to mask the significance of the great substantial fact 
whose distorted expression they are. That the expression of the fact has 
taken a form so nearly farcical is something for which society may be 
indebted to the influence of protectionism, or populism, or to the ethical 
and the clerical economists and sociologists, or to any other of the 
ramifications of the paternalistic tree of life; but the substance, upon 
which these deft artificers may have imposed a vicious form, has been 
furnished by the situation. This substratum of sentiment is, as popular 
sentiment must be, the product of the environment acting upon the average 
intelligence available in the community at the time. An intellectually 
undisciplined populace, especially when under the guidance of leaders whose 
prime qualification for leadership in an intellectual crusade in an intense 
and [460] comprehensive sympathy, may not, at the first stroke, achieve 
what will prove a tenable theory of the facts whose presence has stimulated 
the movement of their brain; but in no community does an appreciably large 
class take a new attitude toward a question of public concern without the 
provocation of a change in the situation of the community, or of some 
considerable portion of it.
The result, in the way of public sentiment, wrought out by the action of 
the environment upon the average intelligence may, within limits, be 
readily shaped by well-meaning advocates of any doctrine which purports to 
solve all new questions that arise and remedy all defects that come into 
view as the economic structure of society grows and changes form. The spell 
of the bearer of a universal solvent is irresistible, at least until his 
nostrum has repeatedly failed in the test, or until the generation which 
has given it credence is dead. Now, we have had at least three lines of 
professedly infallible hortatory instruction converging upon this point in 
popular belief. As between these three, the priority in point of the date 
of its advent into popular teaching, as well as in point of naiveté, 
belongs to the column which upholds the two-fold principle of fiat money 
(greenbackism, bimetallism) and of flat prosperity (protectionism). Second, 
there is a cloud of witnesses, the gentler-mannered spokesmen of the 
pulpit, whose discourse runs upon the duties of the rich toward the poor, 
and of rulers toward their subjects - the duty of a "superior" towards an 
"inferior" class; these bear testimony to the strength and beauty of the 
patriarchal relation - the Spencerian relation of status. Third, there is 
the cis-atlantic line of the Socialists of the Chair, whose point of 
departure is the divine right of the State; whose catch-word is: "Look to 
the State;" whose maxim of political wisdom is: "The State can do no 
wrong." A few decades ago these phrases read, "The King," where they now 
read, "The State." This change of phraseology marks a step in the evolution 
of language, et praetera nihil. The spirit remains the same as ever. It is 
the spirit of loyalty, petition, and submission to a vicarious providence. 
This position has been euphemistically termed State Socialism, but it is, 
in principle, related to socialism as the absolute monarchy is to the 
republic. These three variants of paternalism have had the public ear, and 
have constituted themselves guides and interpreters to the public 
intelligence during the period in which the increasing coherence and 
interdependence within the economic organism has been coming into view, and 
the result is what we see. [461] The ingrained sense and practical tact of 
the American people (or rather of a fraction of it) have been blurred into 
reflecting an uncertain image of industrial paternalism. But with it all 
goes a valuable acquisition in the shape of a crude appreciation of the 
most striking and characteristic fact in modern industrial evolution.
The changed attitude on an economic question, of which many occurrences 
connected with the Army of the Commonweal are an evidence, is in substance 
due to a cumulative organic change in the constitution of the industrial 
community - a change which may, or may not be considered to have reached 
serious proportions, which may, in itself considered, be a change for 
better or for worse, which may still be in its initial stage or may already 
have nearly run its course, but in any case it is a change of sufficient 
magnitude to seek expression, now that the occasion offers. To use a 
Spencerian phrase, advancing "industrial integration" has gone far enough 
to obtrude itself as a vital fact upon the consciousness of an appreciable 
fraction of the common people of the country.
T. B. VEBLEN.
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