Thorstein Veblen
Review Author to:
Economic Development of Modern Europe. By FREDERIC AUSTIN OGG, Associate Professor of Political
Science in the University of Wisconsin. (New York: Macmillan Company. 1917. Pp. xvi, 657. $2.50.)
The American Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jan., 1919), pp.273-275.
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[273] "It is the purpose of this book to indicate the origins, and to explain with some fullness the
nature and effects, of a number of the more important economic changes and achievements in Europe
during the past three hundred years" (preface). The volume falls into four parts, of [274] which
part II., Agriculture, Industry, and Trade since 1815 (pp. 117-340), is the most substantial and
best lives up to the promise of the preface. At the same time, parts III. and IV., Population and
Labor, and Socialism and Social Insurance (pp. 343-641), cover the portion of the field in which
the author is best at home and of which he can speak with authority.
Part II. may be said to be complete in itself, as a sketch of the economic history of Europe
through the period selected. Andas narrative and description covering its period it should be a
very serviceable text, facile, engaging, and well-proportioned on the whole. It is also, on the
whole, conceived in a dispassionate, historical spirit; safe and sound, in a conservative sense,
with no undue color of patriotic animosity or partizan intolerance. What the professed historians
may have to say ofits adequacy as a presentation of the history of this period, is another matter,
of which the reviewer is not competent to speak. But something is due to be said of it as an
endeavor "to indicate the origins, and to explain ... the nature and effects of ... economic
changes and achievements".
It is sane, sound, impartial, and considerate, within the range of commonplace preconceptions
that were current among politicians and publicists toward the close of the nineteenth century,
and that still continue to guide the policies of conservative statesmen; and it sheds the light
of those preconceptions, in a felicitous manner, on the received account of the origins and the
nature and effect of economic changes. In any other sense it can scarcely be said to explain or
account for any appreciable group or sequence of events or for any detail of the unstable
situation which has arisen out of the historical era with which it is occupied. The work of
presentation is well done, and there is no reason to question the accuracy of the information
which it gives; nor is it necessary to find fault with its natural limitations, although it may
not be easy to avoid a feeling of disappointment with an explanation which takes those things
for granted that chiefly need to be explained. These preconceptions that have guided the economic
statecraft of the European nations through the later period of the era have brought these nations
into the unstable situation of the twentieth century and have brought on the climax of their
working-out in the Great War; and it might fairly be expected that some effort should have been
spent in accounting for their origins, nature, and effects, seeing that they are the major facts
in the case; whereas they are tacitly taken for granted as premises inherent in the nature of
things.
So, e.g., that progressive growth of chauvinistic nationalism that characterizes the late-Victorian
period, and after, is assumed as a matter of course, and its imperialistic politics as it runs
throughout the European countries is accepted at the face value assigned it by its disingenuous
spokesmen, as a striving after the common good. This was written [275] late in 1916, when the war
brought on by the bankruptcy of these preconceptions had been running for something more than two
years. So unreservedly is the author committed to these bankrupt preconceptions of reactionary
statecraft, that he even finds himself at home in the "fair-trade" manoeuvres by which the
gentlemen-investors of the United Kingdom have been seeking to safeguard their unearned incomes
(pp. 270-277). So again, the policies and adventures of governments and politicians in colonial
enterprise and trade expansion are taken, quite naively, not at their patent value as a conspiracy
of gentlemen-concessionnaires and dynastic statesmen, but at their conventionally putative value
as an enterprise for the common good - and all in the glaring light thrown on these bankrupt
policies by the war which is the only common outcome to which they have visibly contributed. The
historical explanation at this point as at most others does not go beyond the most unguarded
post hoc of statistical census exhibits.
In the same sense there is a painstaking and very intelligent narrative of the growing uneasiness
of the working classes in these countries, and of the efforts which the workmen have put forth to
better their lot in the losing game they have played unter the same preconceptions, as well as of
the measures taken by the governments to conciliate the workmen and reconcile them to the rules
of the losing game; but it is, again, a description of events, not an explanation of their nature
and incidence. The statistical upshot of it is exhibited, but there is nowhere even a tentative
answer to the Why? - such as one looks for under the caption of explanations; nor is there
anything like an analysis designed to cover the other question - What is likely to come of it all?

THORSTEIN VEBLEN.