The New Republic, May 26, 1917. Article: the title "The Cost of Peace."
Book Review by: Francis Hackett
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation.
By THORSTEIN VEBLEN. (New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, April 1917)
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The Cost of Peace.

Comparatively few people know the work of Thorstein Veblen. Some thousands have 
read his best-known book, the brilliant, drastic Theory of the Leisure Class; 
but only a few hundred have read his Theory of Business Enterprise, his Instinct 
of Workmanship and his Imperial Germany. So little is he known that a 
pretentious man the other day met my mention of The Nature of Peace by saying, 
"Ah, of course, a new translation." He did not know that Thorstein Veblen was an 
American, was graduated from an American university, in the 'eighties, and has 
been teaching in American universities ever since. Mr. Veblen is an American 
writer but the kind of American writer whose merit is rather more clearly 
recognized abroad than at home, an American who ought to have been a foreigner 
to be appreciated in America.
To read Mr. Veblen is not and cannot, be an entertainment. There is a kind of 
fashionable lady who knows precisely when a literary Paquin has ceased to be the 
thing, and who twitters as unfailingly as any bird at the first breath of 
another master's dawn. For all this turn for novelty, few ladies have twittered 
much or are ever going to twitter much about Mr. Veblen's performance. He is too 
difficult to understand. It is hard intellectual labor to read any of his books, 
and to skim him is impossible. He is not a luxurious valley of easy reading, a 
philosophic Tennyson. He is a mountain - stubborn, forbidding, purgatorial. 
There is no funicular to bring him under subjection of the indolent, and 
sometimes there is barely a foothold even for the hardy amid the tortuosities of 
his style. But the reward for those who do persist in reading him is 
commensurate with the effort. No mountain pierces to heaven, not even Mr. 
Veblen's, but the area that he unrolls is strategically chosen and significantly 
inclusive. Part of the reward of reading him may be like the reward of mountain-
climbing itself, the value of tough exercise for its own sake, but unless Mr. 
Veblen created the conviction that his large purposes did reasonably necessitate 
intricate and laborious processes of thought and that such processes had to be 
followed in detail in order that his argument might be mastered, no one would be 
quite satisfied to take the pains he exacts. The greatest justification of such 
pains is the final sense conveyed by him that he has had a singular contribution 
to make, and has made it with complete regard to the formidable requirements of 
responsible unconventional utterance.
The responsible unconventionality of Mr. Veblen has never been better 
exemplified than in this new book of his, finished February, 1917, on the nature 
of peace. It is, so far as I know, the most momentous work in English on the 
encompassment of lasting peace. There are many books that aim to give geographic 
domicile to the kind of tinkered peace that is likely to come out of this war, 
but I know of no book that gives so plain and positive account of the terms "on 
which peace at large may be hopefully installed and maintained," and I know of 
no discussion so searching as to "what if anything there is in the present 
situation that visibly makes for a realization of these necessary terms within a 
calculable future." Those who are acquainted with Mr. Veblen's work are aware of 
the ironic inscrutability of his manner, the detachment that is at once an 
evidence of his impartiality and an intimation of his corrosive scepticism. It 
can no longer be said, with The Nature of Peace under examination, that either 
impartiality or scepticism induces Mr. Veblen to withhold his preference, to 
conceal his bias, in the present contingency. That bias, however, does not lead 
him into any of the current patriotic extravagances. If critical acid can 
corrode the patriotic conceptions of "democracy" and "liberty" that are now so 
familiar, Mr. Veblen makes no attempt to keep such fancies from being eaten 
into. What is left, however, is sufficiently substantial to give him the issue 
that abides in the war, and its bearing on peace, and it provides him with his 
clue to the great eventuality, "the consequences presumably due to follow."
It would be wrong in any review of Mr. Veblen to give a mere bald outline of the 
work that is so full of his manifold mind. There are so many "patent 
imbecilities" (like the protective tariff), so many current egregious practices 
(like business men's sabotage), that receive characteristic illumination in 
transit, the bare colorless statement of his conclusions would completely leave 
out the poignancy that accumulates as he proceeds. His conclusions are, on the 
other hand, impressive enough to indicate the importance of the argument back of 
them, and if only for their suggestion of the massive argument they need to be 
reported. Defeat for the German-Imperial coalition, not victory for the Entente 
belligerents, is the first step toward lasting peace that he recognizes, because 
of the decisive difference "between those people whose patriotic affections 
center about the fortunes of an impersonal commonwealth and those in whom is 
super-added a fervent aspiration for dynastic ascendancy." Peace on terms of 
Germany's unconditional surrender is not discussed by Mr. Veblen on the basis of 
likelihood but on the basis of its desirability in relation to the chances for 
peace, and the unlikelihood of lasting peace in its absence. But this is not the 
ordinary orgiastic contemplation of an enemy destroyed. The elements in Germany 
that conspire against lasting peace are carefully computed, and the terms of 
their disintegration discussed in every detail. It is by no means forgotten that 
if the victorious side is not "shorn over the comb of neutralization and 
democracy" there can in any event be no prospect of perpetuating peace.
The present unfitness of Germany (or Japan) for lasting peace is ascribed by Mr. 
Veblen to the essential dynastic need for warlike enterprise, but he has no 
hesitation whatever in declaring in regard to the Allied Powers that peace in 
general demands the "relinquishment of all those undemocratic institutional 
survivals out of which international grievances are wont to arise." This is not 
the customary emphasis of goodwill-pacifists. They are fain to propose peace on 
the present basis of "national jealousies and discriminations" and what Mr. 
Veblen in his highly personal jargon calls "discrepancies." Mr. Veblen alludes 
to the League to Enforce Peace as a movement for the "collusive safeguarding of 
national discrepancies by force of arms." This toleration of existing 
nationalisms Mr. Veblen plainly regards as an insuperable obstacle to peace. He 
exposes in every detail the predisposition to war that inheres in nationalisms. 
"What the peace-makers might logically be expected to concern themselves about 
would be the elimination of these discrepancies that make for embroilment."
The military defeat of Germany seems to the author a requisite step on the 
direct path to peace. This is only because Germany is dynastic, however, and the 
German people subservient to the dynasty. One of the issues most thoroughly 
debated by Mr. Veblen is the pregnant issue of German democratization, and while 
he lays great stress on the necessity for military defeat as a first requirement 
of democratization he does not believe the disintegrating of Germany's dynastic 
"second nature" is of so hopeless a character as its historic persistence might 
imply. There is no complacency in the attitude that leads him to regard imperial 
Germany (or imperial Japan) as a stumbling-block in the road to lasting peace. 
It is an attitude founded on a strict and even solicitous estimate of the patent 
German and Japanese aims. And in so far as a peace policy involves treatment of 
the German people Mr. Veblen is quite certain that no trade discrimination 
against them, necessarily bound to recoil on the common people, would be 
pacifically effective or justifiable. The persecution of the German common 
people could take no form that would conceivably advance the cause of peace, and 
Mr. Veblen is careful to dissociate his belief that Germany should be beaten 
from the belief that the people of Germany should be made to suffer for their 
differentiation after the war.
Where The Nature of Peace seems to me to rise far and away above the current 
discussions of supernationalism is in its comparative freedom from unanalyzed 
conceptions. There is nothing sacred to Mr. Veblen in the conception of 
patriotism, of property, of success, of manliness, of good breeding, of national 
honor, of prestige. The notion of non-resistance has no terrors for him - he 
writes a chapter on its merits. But so dry is he that it is only one reading him 
attentively who will gather his extraordinarily subversive character, his 
invincible mind. The blessedness of this unsparing intelligence is so great that 
one has a constant acute pleasure in pursuing Mr. Veblen's argument. If one had 
long perceived for oneself, for example, that "business" means waste and 
inefficiency, it is pleasant to have Mr. Veblen introduce the same perceptions, 
but when he proceeds to locate them in his spacious understanding of the whole 
international problem, and to reveal their unquestionable bearing on the 
alternatives of war and peace, one has a happy consciousness of coming honestly 
to a wider and deeper view of realities. This is the supreme gift of Mr. 
Veblen's disinterested inquiry.
The notion that a lasting peace is compatible with the established patriotic 
order of things, with the status of the gentleman in England or the business man 
in the United States, is not entertained for one moment by Mr. Veblen, and 
regardless of the "maggoty conceit of national domination" which demands "the 
virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty," he sees an impediment to peace in the 
dear establishments of "upper-class and pecuniary control" in the allied 
commonwealths. Chief and foremost in the pacific arrangement must come "a 
considerable degree of neutralization, extending to virtually all national 
interests and pretensions, but more particularly to all material and commercial 
interests of the federated peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such 
neutralization would have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now 
apprehended, as, e.g., the German people." All manner of trade discrimination 
has to be abolished - "import, export and excise tariff, harbor and registry 
dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax exemption whether 
partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home and abroad." Besides this 
prescription for "the elimination of discrepancies that make for embroilment," a 
neutralization of citizenship is also indicated, the common man standing to lose 
nothing by these revisions. But Mr. Veblen is frank to say that "this prospect 
of consequences" points to a general revolution. "It has appeared in the course 
of the argument that the preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, 
with all its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible with an 
unwarlike state of peace and security. This current scheme of investment, 
business, and sabotage, should have an appreciably better chance of survival in 
the long run if the present conditions of warlike preparation and national 
insecurity were maintained, or if the projected peace were left in a somewhat 
problematical state, sufficiently precarious to keep national animosities alert, 
and thereby to the neglect of domestic interests, particularly of such interests 
as touch the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also appeared that 
the cause of peace and its perpetuation might be materially advanced if 
precautions were taken beforehand to put out of the way as much as may be of 
those discrepancies of interest and sentiment between nations and between 
classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities."
The weight of these phrases it is not easy to catch in passing, but nothing more 
significant has been written since the outbreak of the war. One has only to go 
back to The Theory of Business Enterprise, published in 1904, to learn how Mr. 
Veblen foresaw this war, and America's participation in it. The same rigor of 
intellectual standard that gave him a command of the situation at that time is 
discernible in this present volume, and gives him dominance now. Such severity 
of mind as Mr. Veblen exhibits is not likely to win him many readers, despite 
its Brahms-like quality, but the recommendation of Mr. Veblen is not merely the 
recommendation of a great philosopher of industrialism. It is not his relentless 
logic alone that elevates him. It is the democratic bias which The Nature of 
Peace indicates.
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