Review of Veblen's "Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution",
by Guy Stanton Ford.
American Historical Review (London: Macmillan, 1916).
Vol. XXI (October 1915 to July 1916).

No. 4 (July, 1916), pp. 801-802.
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[801]
Veblen: Imperial Germany

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. By Thorstein Veblen. (New York 
and London: The Macmillan Company. 1915. Pp. viii, 324.)

This book is a study from the standpoint of sociology of the complete and sudden 
transfer to Germany of the industrial and commercial processes developed in 
England since the Elizabethan age. The problem treated is that of the co-
operation and mutual reaction of machine industry and a feudal, military, 
dynastic Imperial-State. What is the result when the modern economic order based 
on technological methods is amalgamated with a social and political order still 
essentially medieval?

The author begins his theme "doubtfully and far away" in the neolithic age, to 
show that the races of northern Europe were of the same hybrid stock and free 
borrowers. To this is added a discussion of borrowing by one group or nation 
from another. The people which develops anything does it in spite of all sorts 
of social inhibitions from existing wont and custom which hamper its 
uncompromised and logical acceptance. The borrowing nation takes it over and 
sets it in a new matrix where these hindrances are almost entirely lacking. It 
therefore reaches quickly in the borrowing nation a more perfect development and 
the borrowers receive in a single generation benefits and results not achieved 
by the parent nation in four generations, if ever.

The Industrial Revolution in England in its first one hundred years under free 
competition and a governmental laissez-faire policy gave England a considerable 
"depauperate" working population whose physical deterioration has affected later 
generations. She is not able to rid herself summarily of antiquated machinery 
and industrial plants suffering by depreciation from obsolescence. "The 
technological knowledge and proficiency gained by the community [England] in the 
course of modern times primarily serves, by right of ownership, the pecuniary 
gain of the business men in control and only secondarily contributes to the 
welfare of the population." The beneficiaries have developed an elaborate 
technique of consumption based on the social propriety of "conspicuous waste". 
It costs time and money to develop "a gentleman" and "the English today lead the 
Christian world both in the volume of their gentility and its cost per unit". In 
all this half-heartedly accepted order, England drifters from the Continental 
peoples and especially from the Germans who have "retained conventional virtues 
in a more archaic material civilization. Hence a discrepancy in 'culture' that 
has become irreconcilable."

A chapter on the dynastic state traces its development from primitive 
insubordination and anarchy to group solidarity which approves the 
aggrandizement of its accredited leader to the point of irresponsibility. A 
euphemism makes subjection bear the name of "duty", "flunkeyism dignified with a 
metaphysical nimbus".

[802] In the nineteenth century, Germany, a community habituated to a belief in 
divine rights and led by a state "with no cultural traits other than a medieval 
militarism resting on a feudally servile agrarian system", took over the English 
technological system. The new business development made for the larger Germany. 
The state removed the barriers while rigidly pruning back inimical political 
popular sentiment and distributing favors to the masses by class legislation. 
The industrial leaders did not need to spend their time on being gentlemen. That 
social position was already monopolized by the feudal nobility whose traditions 
made it easy for the Imperial-State to organize them as military specialists. 
Military traditions, not wholly Prussian, were carefully kept and discipline and 
tutelage fitted well into the scheme of a large-scale production. But the result 
is to leave Germany as a cultural community "in an eminently unstable 
transitional phase". She has not forgotten enough of the old nor fully 
assimilated western civilization. The Imperial-State has directed the new 
development into a new form of the old dynastic state aggression. It can now 
neither get along with nor without machine industry. The present offensive 
defensive war for dominion may give personal government reprieve, and "the 
movement for cultural reversion", even if it nominally loses, stands to gain "by 
the arrest of Western civilization at large".

Professor Veblen is, nevertheless, mildly optimistic as to the results of the 
war but with no constructive suggestions as to the new order.

It is a brilliant book and well worth reading. The grim, sardonic, subtle, 
scholastic irony on every page including the foot-notes conveys more than the 
author seems free to say and more than any brief notice can reproduce. It is an 
objective application of antidotes for self-satisfaction in any national group.

Guy Stanton Ford.
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