Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 8. (Oct., 1915), pp. 852-854.
Book Review by: R. E. Freeman
Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. By THORSTEIN VEBLEN. New York: 
Macmillan, 1915. 8vo. pp. viii + 324. $1.50.
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[852] The work is an application of Professor Veblen's well-known technological 
interpretation of history to the case of modern Germany. It is based on the fact 
that to each technological system there is attached a certain apparatus of 
convention and standard usage, and that, in evolution of society, the latter 
tends to persist, surviving the former, and living on into a new industrial 
system, opposing and shaping its development. In such a tendency, the author 
finds an explanation of the conflicting ideas of Great Britain and Germany and 
their different governmental organizations.
Now the Germans and English are both of hybrid composition, the racial 
constituents being largely the same. This hybrid composition [853] gives a great 
facility in borrowing and "acts to hinder any given scheme or system from 
attaining a definitive stability." Thus England in early Tudor times borrowed a 
handicraft technology which was luckily stripped of the restrictive gild and 
charter regulations, the settled usages, routes, and methods that were then 
prevailing on the Continent. Aided, in addition, by her insularity and 
comparative immunity from war, England speedily developed the borrowed arts and 
crafts and led the way in the invention of labor-saving devices. The Continental 
technology fostered, on English soil, a spirit of individualism and democracy 
which encouraged the formulation of a philosophy of natural rights and an 
economic doctrine of freedom of competition. But unfortunately there grew up 
along with this a host of evil working conditions, an increasing obsolescence of 
technology, wasteful habits of living, costly amusements, armies of menials, and 
other unnecessary paraphernalia that impeded the increase of industrial 
efficiency.
Germany, however, borrowed the modern mechanical processes without the 
individualistic philosophy and the other economic and cultural consequences. She 
received the technology of Britain into a feudal system where high industrial 
efficiency is wedded to a spirit of fealty and subservience. But as modern 
industry abhors national frontiers and local traits, the hegemony of Prussia 
among the German kingdoms was a condition essential to German industrial 
prosperity. So Prussia came with a militarism more vigorous and feudalistic than 
the other kingdoms and formed a dynastic state in the center of Europe. She 
immediately turned the wonderful technological efficiency of her citizens to her 
own ends, and, to overcome the prejudice of her people against personal 
servitude, changed fealty to a feudal monarch into subordination to a collective 
strength vested in a divinely appointed emperor. She instituted an imperial 
tariff policy, compulsory military service, and a government system of 
industrial tutelage; and by means of these developed a superior fighting 
machine.
Such, in short, are the economic factors underlying the great ideals that 
antagonize one another on the battlefields of Europe: in England, individualism 
and democracy; in Germany, the spirit of subordination and the dynastic state. 
Around the German ideal of the state, fostered by imperial control of education 
and a sense of national efficiency and solidarity, there grew up a whole 
cultural scheme. The industrial revolution has not been able to exert its 
fullest cultural influence upon the German people, as it did in England, but 
eventually it will undermine the foundations of the dynastic state. So that "the 
movement for cultural reversion," for which the Germans strive today, "stands to 
gain [854] at least to the extent of a substantial, though presumably temporary, 
impairment and arrest of Western civilization at large."
This explanation is one that goes to the roots of the national spirit - one that 
gives a place to both material and ideal factors. Professor Dewey's recent book 
deals with the philosophic basis of the German spirit and, taken in conjunction 
with the work of Professor Veblen, puts rich significance into the present war. 
"Every living thought represents a gesture made towards the world, an attitude 
taken to some practical situation in which we are implicated." If the reader has 
developed a taste for the author's characteristically cumbrous verbiage, he will 
find Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution excellent in every respect.
R. E. FREEMAN
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO