Thorstein Veblen
Review author to: 'Aristocracy and Evolution: A Study of the Rights, the Origin, 
and the Social Functions of the Wealthier Classes.' By W. H. MALLOCK. New York: 
The Macmillan Company, 1898. 8vo, pp. xxxiii + 385.
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3. (Jun., 1898), pp. 430-435.
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[430] On a cursory acquaintance with this volume one is tempted to dismiss it 
with the comment that Mr. Mallock has written another of his foolish books. The 
objective point of the new book is still the enforcement of the author's pet 
fallacy, which he has expounded so felicitously on many a former occasion. It is 
restated here with somewhat greater circumstance than before, and is backed by 
much telling illustration and some substantial information that might well have 
served a more useful purpose. A fuller acquaintance with its contents, however, 
will convince the reader that the book has substantial merits, although these 
merits do not belong with the economic side of the argument.
While the present volume covers a wider range of phenomena and traces the 
working of the great man's dominating efficiency through a greater variety of 
human relations than Mr. Mallock's earlier books have done, the chief point of 
the argument is still the productive efficiency of the great man in industry and 
the bearing of this productive efficiency upon the equitable claim of the 
wealthy classes to a superior share of the product. What is to be proven is the 
equity and the expediency of a system of distribution in which a relatively 
large share of the product of industry goes to the owners of capital and the 
directors of business. For this purpose "the great man" in industry is tacitly 
identified with the captain of industry or the owner of capital. It is right 
that the great man, so understood, should receive a large share, because he 
produces a large proportion of the product of industry (book iii; pp. 197-
267). And it is expedient that exceptional gains should come to this exceptional 
wealth-producer, because on no other terms can he be induced to take care of the 
economic welfare of the community - and, in the nature of things, [431] the 
welfare of the community, of the many, lies unreservedly in the hands of the 
minority of great men (book iv; pp. 271-380).
The few are the chief producers.
All the democratic formulas which for the past hundred years have represented 
the employed as the producers of wealth, and the capitalistic employers as the 
appropriators of it, are, instead of being as they claim to be, the expressions 
of a profound truth, related to truth only as being direct inversions of it. 
Whatever appearances may seem to show to the contrary, it is the few and not the 
many who, in the domain of economic production, are essentially and permanently 
the chief repositories of power (pp. 174-175).
The case of labour directed by different great men is the same as the case of 
labour applied to different qualities of land. The great men produce the 
increment. Labour, however, must be held to produce that minimum necessary to 
the support of the labourers, both in agriculture and in all kinds of 
production. The great man produces the increment that would not be produced by 
labour if his influence ceased. Labour, it is true, is essential to the 
production of the increment, also; but we cannot draw any conclusions from the 
hypothesis of labour ceasing; for the labourers would have to labor whether the 
great men were there or no (pp. 202-206, margin). The efficiency of labour 
itself is practically constant; and for the student of wealth-production the 
principal force to be studied is the ability of the few, by which the labour of 
the many is multiplied, and which only exerts itself under special social 
circumstances (p. 209, note).
We are thus enabled to discriminate arithmetically between the share of the 
product due to the great men and that due to the many.
Let us take the case of the United Kingdom, and consider the amount per head 
that was annually produced by the population a hundred years ago. This amount 
was about £14. At the present time it is something like £35 .... Now, if we 
attribute the entire production of this country, at the close of the last 
century, to common or average labour (which is plainly an absurd concession), we 
shall gain some idea of what the utmost limits of the independent productivity 
of the ordinary man are; for the ordinary man's talents as a producer, when 
directed by nobody but himself, have, as has been said already, not appreciably 
increased in the course of two thousand years, and have certainly not increased 
within the past three generations. The only thing that has increased has been 
the concentration on the ordinary man's productive talents of the productive 
talents of the exceptional man. The talents of the exceptional man, in fact, 
have been the only variant in the problem; and, accordingly, the minimum which 
these talents produce is the total difference between £14 and £35.
[432] This argument may be restated in a more concise arithmetical form after 
adding a further premise, which is implied, though not fully taken account of, 
in Mr. Mallock's exposition. The talents of the ordinary man have not changed 
within the past three generations, or if they have changed it is but by a 
variation so small that it can only be indicated, not quantitatively registered; 
the like is true of the talents of the exceptional man. This latter feature of 
the premises has not been brought out by Mr. Mallock, although his claim that 
human talents have remained constant plainly involves it. The trails of human 
nature have not appreciably changed within the period in question. The race of 
British subjects is much the same as it has been. But in order to allow for a 
possible, though inappreciable change; in the talents of the two classes, the 
conceivable infinitesimal change may be indicated by the use of accents. The 
arithmetical problem in hand will then present the following result:
(1) o (ordinary) x g (great man) = 14.
(2) o' x g' = 35.
But since 35 may be broken up and written 14 + 21, it follows that, in the 
second equation, 21 of the entire product (35) is the product of g' alone. Q. E. 
D.
This traverses the ancient traditions of arithmetic, but it is to be said in 
legitimation of this procedure that it would be extremely difficult to get the 
same result by a different method. Any man encumbered with a hide-bound 
arithmetic would find himself constrained to look for some other variable in the 
problem than a special segment of that human nature which is by supposition 
declared invariable; nor would such a one have the courage to portion out the 
meum and tuum as between two factors of a joint product. But Mr. Mallock is 
without fear.
Some account, though scant, is taken by Mr. Mallock of the phenomena of 
transmitted knowledge, usages, and methods of work; but these facts are not 
allowed to count as against the primacy of the great man. And as regards this 
great man, where he is first characterized and expounded, in the chapter 
especially devoted to him ("Great Men, as the True Cause of Progress," pp. 55-
88), the chief variants of him that concern economic theory are the inventor, 
the overseer of industrial processes, and the business man. The impression is 
conveyed in this early chapter that for the industrial purpose the greatest of 
these is the inventor, and next him ranks the director of [433] mechanical 
processes, while the business man comes into view as a wealth-producer chiefly 
in an indirect way by influencing the motions of the two former, and, through 
them, the motions of "ordinary men" engaged in manual labor. At a later point, 
when the question comes to concern the appraisement of productivity and the 
equitable apportionment of the product, the inventor, the engineer and the 
foreman disappear behind the business man's ledger, as the peppercorn disappears 
behind the nutshell, and "the great man" becomes synonymous with "the captain of 
industry." By a curious inversion of his own main position, Mr. Mallock reaches 
the broad verdict that consumable goods are mainly produced by the captain of 
industry. His main position, so far as regards industrial efficiency, is that 
the greatness and efficiency of the great man lie in his superior knowledge, 
which he is able to impose upon others and so direct their efforts to the result 
aimed at. "The master of knowledge, as applied to production, is the inventor" 
(p. 138). "The inventor ... is an agent of 'social progression' only because the 
particularized knowledge of which his invention consists is embodied either in 
models, or drawings, or written or spoken orders, and thus affects the technical 
action of whole classes of other men" (p. 139) Under the capitalistic wage 
system "productive power has increased because capital ... has enabled a few men 
to apply, with the most constant and intense effort, their intellectual 
faculties to industry in its minutest details" (p. 161). Productive efficiency, 
therefore, is a matter of detailed knowledge of the technical processes of 
industry, and the application of this knowledge through directing the technical 
movements of others. Yet the type of productive efficiency in the advanced 
portion of Mr. Mallock's argument is taken to be the counting-house activity of 
the business man, who frequently does not, and pretty uniformly need not, have 
any technical knowledge of the industry that goes on under his hand. His 
relation to the mechanical processes is always remote, and usually of a 
permissive kind only. This is especially true of the director of a large 
business, who is by that fact, if he is successful, a highly efficient great 
man. He delegates certain men, perhaps at the second or third remove, to assume 
discretion and set certain workmen and machines in motion under the guidance of 
technical knowledge possessed by them, not by him. The captain's efficiency is 
not to be called in question, but it is bold irony to call it productive 
efficiency under the definition of productivity set up by Mr. Mallock.
[434] Most modern men would have been content to justify the business man's 
claim to a share in the product on the ground of his serviceability to the 
community, without specifically imputing to him the major part in the production 
of goods; but Mr. Mallock's abounding faith in the canons of natural rights 
compels him naively to account for the business man's income in terms of 
productive efficiency simply. The argument of the book as is evident especially 
in the concluding portion (book iv; pp. 271-380), is chiefly directed to the 
confutation of the socialists. And in this confutation it is the ancient, now 
for the most part abandoned, socialist position that is made the point of 
attack. This early socialist position was summed up in the claim that to the 
laborer should belong the entire product of his labor. The claim is a crude 
application of a natural-rights dogma, and for the living generation of 
socialists it may fairly be said to be a discarded standpoint. It is this dead 
dog that Mr. Mallock chiefly belabors. Together with this, the similarly 
obsolete natural-rights formula that all men are born free and equal comes in 
for a portion of his polemical attention. In all this, the polemic proceeds on 
the lost ground of natural rights. Objection is taken not to the obvious 
groundlessness of the whole natural-rights structure, but to the scope of the 
application given the dogmas and to the excessive narrowness of the definitions 
employed.
Through it all, however, Mr. Mallock very effectively presents the current 
arguments going to show that the pecuniary incentive is indispensable to modern 
industry, and he shows, with great detail and with good effect, the weakness of 
the socialist contentions on this head. He goes with the socialists to the 
length of showing that the pecuniary incentive - the desire of wealth - is in 
large part a desire for distinction only, not in the last analysis a desire for 
the material, consumable goods. But he denies flatly - what they affirm - that 
an emulative incentive of another kind might serve the turn if the pecuniary 
incentive were to fall away. No other method of gauging success and distinction 
will take the place of this one as an incentive to wealth-production, whatever 
seems to be true as regard other directions of effort (book iv. chap. ii; pp. 
284-323). It is to be regretted that nothing beyond asseveration is put forward 
in support of this denial, which is the central feature of the refutation of 
socialism. No decisive argument for the denial is adduced, but through the 
assertion made there runs an implication that, in order to serve their purpose 
at all effectively, the inducements offered the wealth-producer [435] must 
mechanically resemble the results to be worked out. As on the homeopathic 
principle like is to be cured by like, so in industry the repugnance to effort 
spent on material goods must be overcome by a remedial application of material 
goods. While it seems to be present in the reasoning, it is by no means clear, 
it should be remarked, that this axiom of similarity has been present in the 
reasoner's mind.
Mr. Mallock is a matter of pleasing diction, and his arguments are presented in 
a lucid and forcible way that makes the book very attractive reading. And the 
grotesquely devious ways of its economic argument do not prevent it from being a 
suggestive contribution to the discussion of cultural development. At many 
points it brings out in a strong light the importance of a gifted minority as an 
element in the process of institutional growth, although even here it is 
curious, and in a sense instructive, to note that as representative spokesmen of 
the modern social sciences Mr. Mallock has been constrained to cite George, 
Laveleye, and Mr. Kidd. The discussion of the great man's place in the cultural 
process is at its best where it deals with other fields than the economic. 
Unfortunately, it is the economic bearing of the argument alone that can be 
taken up here.
The volume suffers from a meretricious increase of bulk, due to an excessive use 
of large type, wide margins and heavy paper. It should be added that the 
printer's work is altogether above reproach.
T. B. V.