The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 5. (Mar., 1915), pp. 706-708. Book Review by: Edward C. Hayes. The Instinct of Workmanship. By THORSTEIN VEBLEN. New York: MacMillan, 1914. Pp. viii + 355. $1.50. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The present volume is a worthy companion to its author's well-known work on The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is a further description of the characteristics of society that result from the prestige of wealth. According to Professor Veblen, progress and welfare are mostly the expression of the instinct of workmanship and the parental (or altruistic) instinct. The operation of these is much "contaminated" by baser instincts which also take a share in the molding of institutions and of the habits in which social institutions become entrenched. "History records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, for instance, as now faces the peoples of Christendom" (p. 25). Yet hope may be derived from the fact that "changes are going forward constantly and incontinently in the habitual scheme of rules and principles that regulate the community's life" (p. 35). But "so long as parental solicitude and sense of workmanship, do not lead men to take thought and correct this otherwise unguarded drift of things, the growth of usage, customs, etc., as it goes forward under the driving force of the several instincts native to man, will commonly run at cross purposes with serviceability and the sense of workmanship" (p. 49). The social sentiments and judgments that characterize a "pecuniary" basis of organization afford incentive to business rather than to workmanship, that is, to the effort to get rather than the effort to produce, to acquisition rather than serviceability. Work even becomes discreditable, except in so far as it is redeemed from disrepute by acquisitive success. "The display of wealth in conspicuous waste gives an economically untoward direction to industry." And "the incessant gnawing of incompatible pecuniary interests entails estrangement and distrust between persons, classes, and nations," and "lowers the efficacy of human industry" (p. 175). [707] Moreover, the control of industry comes into the hands of business men, rather than of technologists, greatly to the detriment of its productivity. And the owners of material wealth are in effect the owners of the working capacity of the community and of the social stock of skills and technologies, for it is they, and not the skilled, who possess the usufruct of the work and of the skill, "with the contingent qualification that if the community does this work it must be allowed a livelihood, whereby the gross returns that go in the first instance to these owners suffer abatement by that much. This required livelihood is adjusted to a conventional standard of living" (p. 220). "What threw the fortunes of the industrial community into the hands of the men of accumulated wealth was a complex of technological changes which so enlarged the requirements, in respect of material equipment that the impecunious workmen could no longer carry on their trade except by a working agreement with the owners of their equipment" (p. 228). We still cling to a philosophy of Natural Rights, that is, the appropriate offspring of a handicraft system of industry, and show a "somewhat blind fervor" in "the idyllic enterprise of rehabilitating that obsolescent 'competitive system' that embodied the system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the era of handicraft and went under in its dissolution" (p. 298). We have not yet developed the institutions appropriate to a system of machine technology, for "in its bearing on the growth of institutions the machine technology has yet scarcely had time to make its mark" (p. 340). "The system of Natural Rights and individual self-help did not come to passible maturity and take rank as a principle of enlightened common-sense until the era of handicraft and petty trade, of which it is the institutional by-product, was already giving way to the era of machine industry. ... Hitherto the work of the machine industry has been organized and conducted under a code of legal rights and business principles adapted to the state of industrial arts which the machine industry has displaced" (p. 342). This may sound like an argument for socialism. But Professor Veblen is not advocating any legislative measures whatever, but a development of prevalent ideas and sentiments adapted to turn the existing industrial system to human uses. The passages quoted give only one strand of the argument. The author discusses at equal length the character of the prevalent religious, philosophical, and scientific or pre-scientific conceptions that correlate with different stages of economic development, in part as effects, in part as causes. [708] As to the economic tendency of the book, each reader will judge for himself according to his light and his prejudices. Possibly the general truth of the book would have been surer of acceptance if it had not been quite so much left to the reader to supply qualifications and answer objections. Questions might be raised with reference to some of the author's expressions on such debatable matters as the exact conception of instincts, or as the relation between institutions and habits, or as racial tracts, and one might query whether at points he has not yielded to the temptation to squeeze the last drop out of a theory, for instance in what he says concerning the causal relation between the price system and the growth of quantitative science. Unquestionably it is a book of intelligence and learning. And it is thoroughly characterized by the sociological point of view in that it recognizes the fundamental importance of inborn propensities, in that it is broadly comparative in method with a liberal use of ethnological material, and especially in that it clearly recognizes the character of those tough and momentous, yet changing, realities which are built up out of the ideas and sentiments which, as a result of a continuous process of natural causation, prevail at any given time in many minds. EDWARD C. HAYES UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS