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Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution

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In the recent hardcover edition which I have, the dates of printing of Thorstein Veblen's book IMPERIAL GERMANY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION are listed as 1915, 1939, and 1964. In the first two years listed, America was safely sitting on the sidelines, observing the kind of warlike behavior attributed to the dynastic state in this book in Europe, much as Elizabethan England enjoyed several centuries of isolation from the wars which were devastating Europe in the years in which its economic activities became industrial, though socially, as Veblen observed, "Conventions that are in some degree effete continue to cumber the ground." (p. 30). By 1964, America was playing such a large role in the world that Germany might have been the kind of problem that America, from a unique position of political and military superiority, ought to have been able to resolve, and possibly did by acting as if the major problems in the world were somewhere else.

Chapter I, Introductory -- Races and Peoples, compares the mixture of races which populated England and Germany to be quite similar, if not exactly the same. A note on page 23, in Chapter 2, The Old Order, compares such mixing with what occurred in Japan, "and possibly also the Aegean peoples of antiquity." "By a curious coincidence, the period of Japanese prehistory and history seems to cover loosely the same general interval of time as that of the Baltic peoples; and as with the latter, so in the case of the Japanese, the cultural life-history of the people is a history of facile and ubiquitous borrowing done in the most workmanlike manner and executed with the most serviceable effect."

In the chapter on The Dynastic State, Veblen notes that printing was a handicraft which was well practiced in Germany, and included "the circulation of obnoxious literature that purveys excessively modern ideas" (note on p. 76), but that it appeared to be best "to engender that habit of reading as to make the assimilation of the new industrial order an easy matter, resulting in a marked advance in efficiency and physical comfort, and then to temper coercion with a well-conceived cajolery." (note, p. 76).

One of the pleasures of reading Veblen is encountering philosophical ideas in an utterly different context, as on page 109:

. . . While the corresponding English movement, in so far as touches the point here in question, has tended strongly to an atheistic and unmoral scheme of opaque and impersonal matter of fact. This work of the human spirit as it has come into play under the German habituation is spoken of as "nobler," "profounder,"--a point not to be disputed, since such discrimination is invidious and is an affair of taste and perspective.

The final paragraph of the chapter on The Case of England is devoted to the "direct waste of time and substance involved in this ubiquitous addiction to sports." (p. 148). I enjoy Veblen's offhandedly remarkable description of how "persons with a predilection for artistic and intellectual dissipations may be moved to deprecate addiction to dissipations of this crude and brutalizing nature," (p. 148) but this book deserves far more serious readers than I am.