"Review of Veblen's Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution",
by The New York Times, July 18, 1915, p. BR258

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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN GERMANY

Mr. Veblen's Interesting Theory to Account for the Rapidity of Economic Growth 
in the Empire.

IMPERIAL GERMANY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. By Thorstein Veblen.
The Macmillan Company. $1.50.

Though Mr. Veblen’s essay on the sources of German efficiency was begun before 
the war, many of its points have been elaborated in the light of that event. It 
is, therefore, altogether timely in its interest, besides being an economic 
study of permanent value, fully up to the standard of this author’s “Theory of 
the Leisure Class” and “Instinct of Workmanship.” Its scope is defined in these 
words:

"It aims to account for Germany’s industrial advance and high efficiency by 
natural causes, without drawing on the logic of manifest destiny. Providential 
nepotism, national genius, and the like. It is believed to be the first attempt 
yet made at an explanation, as distinct from description or eulogy of this 
episode in modern economic history."

The underlying source of Germany’s great military development, and, therefore, 
of the war, is that nation’s wonderful industrial expansion in the brief space 
of half a century. Why this rapidity of economic growth?

Mr. Veblen says it is due to the natural law that a borrowed idea or system, if 
it finds congenial soil, flourishes more luxuriantly in new surroundings than it 
could in its original habitat, because it is unhampered by the fallen underbrush 
from which it was evolved.

Germany borrowed her industrial and economic system, her machines, factory 
methods, steamship models, &c. directly from England: and she did so at a moment 
when the new Prussianized empire, with its mediaeval ideas of royal power and 
popular service, furnished an especially rich soil for the exotic plant. Her 
backwardness was actually an advantage. The nation, with its feudal inheritance 
of obedience, did better team work in shop and factory and army than England 
could command with her more modern atmosphere of individual freedom; and the 
German ruling classes saw to it from the beginning that this expanding economic 
power should be securely hitched to their military machine.

Mr. Veblen goes back to the stone age to show that the Teutonic tribes around 
the Baltic Sea were hybrids of three distinct race stocks, and that, probably 
because of their mixed composition, they have always been facile borrowers. 
Until late pagan times there was little difference between German and English 
development. Then England, protected by the sea, slowly forged ahead, and in due 
time was the first to develop the factory system to its fullest extent. It took 
her six times as long to do this as it has taken Germany to borrow it, and now 
she is suffering some of the disadvantages of being a pioneer.

The author finds that the case of Germany is unique among Western nations as 
regards both the abruptness and the thoroughness with which it has adopted 
modern industrial methods, and as regards "the archaism of its cultural 
furniture at the date of this appropriation." Japan is a similar instance in the 
East. But the thing that counts most is the fact that the German people have 
been able to reap this heritage of the English without having paid for it in the 
social weaknesses which the evolving of such a system produces.

Since the Elizabethan age Great Britain has gradually evolved its navy, its 
industries, its world commerce, its railroads, its mills – and its slums. There 
has been waste and loss, as in all evolutions. The English railway system, for 
instance, with its toy freight cars and narrow tracks, is not as efficient as 
the German system, which was built after better forms had been invented. This 
typifies a hundred other obsolescent survivals that ought to be "junked," but 
that are retained by characteristic British conservatism.

"All this does not mean," says Mr. Veblen, "that the British have sinned against 
the canons of technology. It is only that they are paying the penalty for having 
been thrown into the lead and so having shown the way. At the same time it is 
not to be imagined that the lead has brought nothing but pains and penalties. 
The shortcomings of the British industrial situation are visible chiefly by 
contrast with what the British might be doing if it were not for the restraining 
dead hand of their past achievement, and by further contrast, latterly, with 
what the new-come German people are doing by use of the English technological 
lore."

This pioneering has had its effect for good and ill upon the people and upon the 
nature of British loyalty. Long development in little shops and independent 
enterprises has created a spirit of individual freedom which, in a crisis like 
the present, may be a dynastic weakness. The author states it thus:

"The English fall short in point of self-sacrifice and abnegation for the sake 
of dynastic politics, and the advancement of the reigning house and its 
patrician bureaucracy. By contrast with the naïve patriotic solidarity of the 
German people the allegiance of the English might even be called a mitigated 
insubordination rather than loyalty tempered with self-interest."

More serious, however, is the penalty of human waste which England is paying for 
her industrial pioneering. Child labor and long factory hours in the early days 
of intense competition have left a large heritage of weakened physiques and 
defective wills, summarized in the slums of Manchester and London, Germany has 
had the fortune to acquire a modern factory system without – thus far – paying 
that penalty.

In the same class of national waste Mr. Veblen places England’s idle gentry, and 
he is especially severe upon the waste of national strength in sports. He 
denounces the "elaborate futilities" and "superfluity of inanities" exemplified 
in British horse racing, shooting, polo, mountain climbing, as a colossal folly 
which no sane nation would tolerate unless habituated to it from infancy. His 
strictures on this point need a good deal of qualification, but on the whole one 
is inclined to grant his general contention that leisure-class ideas have had a 
deleterious effect on the whole nation. Here is his own summary:

"It is not so much that this perversion of the British population by 
sportsmanlike preoccupations wastes the products and the energies of the 
industrial system as that it perverts the sources from which the efficiency of 
the industrial system is to come. Its high consequence as a means of destruction 
lies in its burning the candle at both ends."

There is, of course, the German wastage of a great standing army, but Mr. Veblen 
shows that on the whole the German system, hateful as it is on the side of 
liberty, has helped rather than hindered industrial efficiency. The imperial 
statesmen have worked out their own ends with a "single-mindedness obstructed by 
no consideration of law, equity, or humanity – a dynastic State cannot be set 
afloat in the milk of human kindness" – but they have a perfect machine, and its 
dynamo is the nation’s flourishing industries.

The net gain, however, is not as large as the Germans themselves have supposed. 
For one thing, there is the lively ill-will produced by their overbearing 
attitude toward other nationalities. More important, however, is the rapid 
industrial gain of neighboring nations, notably France, Russia, and Italy. 
Apparently the Kaiser and his party have waited a little too long to strike 
their blow. The author says:

"Relatively to the situation at large, Germany has latterly been gaining, if at 
all, only at a lessened rate. It is perhaps safe to say that in this relative 
sense the empire has latterly begun to lose. The best guess of a shrewd outsider 
not unduly influenced by the clamorous laudation of the German achievements 
would probably be that the date at which Germany ceased to gain in industry and 
commerce, relatively to the situation at large, came some half a dozen years 
ago. *** In any case it would appear that the defensive offense has been delayed 
beyond the date at which the warlike force of the empire was at its best, 
relatively to the situation at large."

Whether Germany wins or loses, says Mr. Veblen, a temporary impairment and 
arrest of Western civilization is inevitable. What the Prussian-Imperial State 
is contending for is "something in the nature of a reprieve for personal 
government;" but its situation has this curious anomaly, that if the empire 
could not get along without machine industry, neither can it ultimately get 
along with it, "since this industrial system in the long run undermines the 
foundation of the State."

Though sometimes too wordy and often needlessly technical in its language, this 
book contains much vigorous, original thinking, and its main conclusions command 
assent.
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