THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
have been the most universal and most radical mutation which human culture by undergone in its advance from savagery to civilisation; and the causes of it should be of a similarly universal and intrinsic character.
It may be taken as a generalisation grounded in the instinctive endowment of mankind that the human sense of workmanship will unavoidably go on turning to account what there is in hand of technological knowledge, and so will in the course of time, by insensible gains perhaps, gradually change the technological scheme, and therefore also the scheme of customary canons of conduct answering to it; and in the absence of overmastering circumstances this sequence of change must, in a general way, set in the direction of great technological mastery. Something in the way of an “advance” in workmanlike mastery is to be looked for, in the absence of inexorable limitations of environment. The limitations may be set by the material circumstances or by circumstances of the institutional situation, but on the lower levels of culture the insurmountable obstacles to such an advance appear to have been those imposed by the material circumstances; although institutional factors have doubtless greatly retarded the advance in most cases, and may well have defeated it in many. In some of the known lower cultures such an impassable conjuncture in the affairs of technology has apparently been reached now and again, resulting in a “stationary state” of the industrial arts and of social arrangements, economic and otherwise. Such an instance of “arrested development” is afforded by the Eskimo, who have to all appearance reached the bounds of technological mastery possible in the material circumstances in which they have been placed and with the technological antecedents which they have had to go on.
At the other extreme of the American continent the Fuegians and Patagonians may similarly have reached at least a provisional limit of the same nature; though such a statement is less secure in their case, owing to the scant and fragmentary character of the available evidence. So also the Bushmen, the Ainu, various representative communities of the Negrito and perhaps of the Dravidian stocks, appear to have reached a provisional limit - barring intervention from without. In these latter instances the decisive obstacles, if they are to be accepted as such, seem to lie in the human-nature of the case rather than in the material circumstances. In these latter instances the sense of workmanship, though visibly alert and active, appears to have been inadequate to carry out the technological scheme into further new ramifications for want of the requisite intellectual aptitudes, - a failure of aptitudes not in degree bbbut in kind.
The manner in which increasing technological mastery has led over from the savage plan of free workmanship to the barbarian system of industry under pecuniary control is perhaps a hazardous topic of speculation; but the known facts of primitive culture appear to admit at least a few general propositions of a broad and provisional character. It seems reasonably safe to say that the archaic savage plan of free workmanship will commonly have persisted through the palaeolithic period of technology, and indeed somewhat beyond the transition to the neolithic. This is fairly borne out by the contemporary evidence from savage cultures. In the prehistory of the north-European culture there is also reason to assume that the beginnings of a pecuniary control fall in the early half of the neolithic period.97 There seems to be no sharply definable point in the technological advance that can be said of itself to bring on this revolutionary change in the institutions governing economic life. It appears to be loosely correlated with techno-logical improvement, so that it sets in when a sufficient ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can apparently not be stated in terms of the industrial arts alone. Among the early consequences of an advance in technology beyond the state of the industrial arts schematically indicated above, and coinciding roughly with the palaeolithic stage, is on the one hand an appreciable resort to “indirect methods of production”, involving a systematic cultivation of the soil, domestication of plants and animals; or an appreciable equipment of industrial appliances, such as will in either case require a deliberate expenditure of labour and will give the holders of the equipment something more than a momentary advantage in the quest of a livelihood. On the other hand it leads also to an accumulation of wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to anyone but their savage bearer.
Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry is given, in that the “roundabout process of production” yields an income above the subsistence of the workmen engaged in it, and the material equipment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live stock, mechanical contrivances) binds this roundabout process of industry to a more or less determinate place and routine, such as to make surveillance and control possible. So far as the workman under the new phase of technology is dependent for his living on the apparatus and the orderly sequence of the, “roundabout process” his work may be controlled and the surplus yielded by his industry may be turned to account; it becomes worth while to own the material means of industry, and ownership of the material means in such a situation carries with it the usufruct of the community’s immaterial equipment of technological proficiency.
The substantial fact upon which the strategy of ownership converges is this usufruct of the industrial arts, and the tangible items of property to which the claims of ownership come to attach will accordingly vary from time to time, according as the state of the industrial arts will best afford an effectual exploitation of this usufruct through the tenure of one or another of the material items requisite to the pursuit of industry. The chief subject of ownership may accordingly be the cultivated trees, as in some of the South Sea islands; or the tillable land, as happens in many of the agricultural communities; or fish weirs and their location, as on some of the salmon streams of the American north-west coast; or domestic animals, as is typical of the pastoral culture; or it may be the persons of the workmen, as happens under divers circumstances both in pastoral and in agricultural communities; or, with an advance in technology of such a nature as to place the mechanical appliances of industry in a peculiarly advantageous position for engrossing the roundabout processes of production, as in the latterday machine industry, these mechanical appliances may become the typical category of industrial wealth and so come to be accounted “productive goods” in some eminent sense.
The institutional change by which a pecuniary regulation of industry comes into effect may take one form or another, but its outcome has commonly been some form of ownership of tangible goods. Particularly has that been the outcome in the course of development that has led on to those great pecuniary cultures of which Occidental civilisation is the most perfect example. But just in what form the move will be made, if at all, from free workmanship to pecuniary industry and ownership, is in good part a question of what the material situation of the community will permit. In some instances the circumstances have apparently not permitted the move to be made at all. The Eskimo culture is perhaps an extreme case of this kind.
The state of the industrial arts among them has apparently gone appreciably beyond the technological juncture indicated above as critical in this respect. It involves a considerable specialisation and accumulation of appliances, such as boats, sleds, dogs, harness, various special forms of nets harpoons and spears, and an elaborate line of minor apparatus necessary to the day’s work and embodying a minutely standardised technique. At the same time these articles of use, together with their household and personal effects, represent something appreciable in the way of portable wealth. Yet in their economic (pecuniary and industrial), domestic, social, or religious institutions the Eskimo have substantially not gone beyond the point of customary regulation commonly associated with the simpler, hand-to-mouth state of the industrial arts typical of the palaeolithic savage culture. And this archaic Eskimo culture, with its highly elaborated technology, is apparently of untold antiquity; it is even believed by competent students of antiquity to have stood over without serious advance or decline since European palaeolithic times - a period of not less than ten thousand years.98 The causes conditioning this “backward” type of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with a relatively advanced and extremely complete technological system, are presumed to lie in their material surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a congestion of people within a small area or enable the organisation and control of a compact community of any considerable size; while on the other hand they exact a large degree of cooperation and common interest, on pain of extreme hardship if not of extinction.
More perplexing at first sight is the case of such sedentary agricultural communities as