The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Jan., 1915), pp. 78-
80.
Book Review by: E. H. Downey.
The Instinct of Workmanship. By THORSTEIN VEBLEN. New York: 
MacMillan, 1914. 8vo, pp. 355. $ 2.00.
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[78] Professor Thorstein Veblen holds a peculiar place among 
American economists. Coming early to the standpoint of modern 
evolutionary science, he has centered his whole attention upon those 
phenomena of institutional growth and change which orthodox 
economists have left on one side in order to study the fabled notions 
of the hedonistic man. Wherefore he has been a thorn in the flesh of 
his pre-Darwinian colleagues and an inspiration to those who would 
make of economics a modern science.
His latest work takes direct issue with an ancient and fundamental 
postulate of orthodox economics - that "aversion to labor" which was 
one of the two or three human traits allowed to the "economic man" by 
John Stuart Mill,(1*) and which is the basis of labor-pain-cost theories 
of value. Professor Veblen pointed out some years ago that mankind 
is, on the contrary, endowed with a native "aversion to futility," a 
"propensity to useful effort," or an "instinct of workmanship," and that 
the "aversion to labor," which economists have been wont to regard as 
a primordial trait of human nature, is in fact a by-product of that 
institutional development which has created private property and a 
conspicuously leisured class.(2*) This thesis he has now elaborated, 
tracing in outline the fortunes of this native propensity to useful effort 
as it has affected and been affected by the course of cultural growth.
The "instinct of workmanship," in Professor Veblen's conception, is not 
any one "combination of reflexes, responding in a determinate way to 
definite stimuli;(3*) but is, rather, an innately organized predisposition 
toward serviceable effort - serviceable with respect to ends which 
other instinctive dispositions make worth while.(4*) Like other instincts, 
that [79] of workmanship also is adaptive, which is to say modifiable 
by habit, and so becomes the basis of institutions. The propensity in 
question is in this way the institutional taproot of technology as well as 
much of that matter-of-fact knowledge which underlies technology and 
which constitutes the most substantial achievement of mankind.
During the prolonged savagery of the race, when a high degree of 
group solidarity was indispensable to survival, the instinct of 
workmanship and the parental bent with which it is crossed and 
colored, received a bias favorable to the community's fulness of life. In 
the predatory culture which succeeded savagery, workmanship and 
parenthood were contaminated by emulation and the habit of invidious 
comparison so that serviceability came to be rated in terms of 
individual advantage. The same bent has been confirmed, albeit with 
lessened force and an altered direction, by the regime of private 
property and competition. But the ancient bias for the generically 
useful has never been wholly lost. Waste and social disserviceability 
still offend common-sense; self-seeking still finds it worth while to 
stimulate altruism.
To students of economics, the interest of the present work will center 
in chaps. vi and vii, treating, respectively, of the era of handicraft and 
the machine industry. Chap. vii enlarges upon a thesis already stated 
in The Theory of Business Enterprise. The instinctive dispositions are 
adaptive, but the margin of toleration within which adaptation is 
feasible is much narrower than the possible variations of institutions. 
This margin of toleration appears already to be approached by the 
machine-made civilization of our time. The machine technology and 
the dispassionate sweep of mechanical causation which it 
presupposes are alien to the spiritual nature of man, formed by the 
discipline of untold generations which knew not the machine. Hence 
much of the prevalent discontent and cultural instability. The closing 
chapter also touches upon that persuasive view of capitalistic 
exploitation which was set forth more in length in the articles upon the 
"Nature of Capital."(5*)
The Instinct of Workmanship is complementary to much of Professor 
Veblen's earlier work. The standpoint and the method of analysis [80] 
are essentially the same as in The Theory of the Leisure Class, 
though still larger use is made of psychological and ethnological 
material. The style is not so brilliant as that of the last-mentioned work; 
there are no such memorable phrases as "conspicuous waste," 
"pecuniary emulation," or "invidious distinction," and there is distinctly 
less of that veiled satire of which the author is so great a master. The 
subject-matter also is less novel in that the main conceptions, though 
not their detailed working out , are familiar to readers of Professor 
Veblen's earlier books and articles. But the bringing together and 
working out of these conceptions constitute a substantial contribution 
to the understanding of the material civilization by and under which we 
live.
E. H. DOWNEY.
MADISON, WIS.

NOTES:
1) Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 2d ed., 
pp. 137, 138.
2) The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor," 
American Journal of Sociology, IV, 187-201; The Theory of the 
Leisure Class, pp. 15-16, 93, 176.
3) Cf. Parmalee, The Science of Human Behavior, p. 226.
4) If it be conceded that hereditary human nature does comprise 
organized dispositions of a "higher" or more complex kind than those 
which are resolvable into simple reflexes - and so much is conceded 
even by Dr. Parmalee (loc. Cit., pp. 245 ff., on "general innate 
tendencies") - then the quarrel between those who employ the term 
"instinct" in ist wider and more popular sense and those who would 
restrict it to a neurological connotation, becomes a terminological 
matter. See critical note, The Instinct of Workmanship, p. 28.
Dr. Parmalee has, curiously enough, confused Professor Veblen's 
"instinct of workmanship" with the motives to (pecuniarily) gainful 
effort, which latter are mainly of conventional, rather than congenital, 
derivation (loc. Cit. P. 252).
5) Quarterly Journal of Economics, XXIII, 104.
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