Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen
that fraction of the population that was given to reading had long been in contact with the intellectual movement in Europe at large and had, indeed, from time to time, taken effective part in the shaping of current ideas, yet this fraction made up so small a class, was so little in touch with the mass of the population, and held its intellectual convictions on such “academic” tenure - that is to say, so uniformly without reënforcement from its own experience of mechanical fact - that with the best intentions it never succeeded in infecting the people at large with its own ideals of a new order, or in disturbing the incumbents of office in their tenure and usufruct of the old order.18 At the same time printed matter is a highly efficient vehicle for the spread, assimilation and standardisation of habits of thought that are otherwise consonant with the workday exigencies of the arts of life; and then, too, the habit of reading is a nearly indispensable auxiliary of that machine technology that invaded the German community in the nineteenth century, - less so, of course, at that date (middle of the century) than at any later time, but sufficiently so even then to count seriously in the outcome.19 Now, literacy, both in the higher potency of “learning” and in the homelier fashion of ability fluently to read print, was relatively common among the German people at the time when the new era came on; and the movement for improving and extending the means of popular education was already in good practicable shape, so that deficiencies in this respect could be made good as fast as they visibly required a remedy. It used to be one of the stock aspersions on the German community that it was top-heavy with a redundance of learned men. Fault-finding on this score has ceased since the latter part of the century, the learned class having been found useful and the demand for men proficient in the sciences having fully caught up. Meantime the character of this learning, or rather the direction of it, has changed somewhat, the change resulting on the whole in a pronounced shift toward those branches of knowledge that have some technological or commercial value.20
As regards the logical relation between the modern industrial advance and the modernised dynastic State in Germany, it may be held that the makers of this State, the policy of the Hohenzollern dynasty from Frederick the Great to William II, have made use of all available technological improvements to extend the dominion and improve the efficiency of the State; or it may be held, on the other hand, that the technological advance which enforced a larger scale of industry and trade, as well as a larger and more expensive equipment and strategy in the art of war, also drove the dynastic State to reorganisation on a new and enlarged plan, involving an increased differentiation of the administrative machinery and a more detailed and exacting control of the sources of revenue.
Either view appears to be equally true. German students of the case have commonly adopted the former, somewhat to the neglect of what force there is in the latter view. It should be evident that the minuscular territorial State of the high tide of German particularism, with its crepuscular statesmanship, would have no chance of survival under the conditions prevailing in Europe in the nineteenth century. It is equally evident that those dynastic statesmen within this circle of particularism who, either by force of insight or by force of special exigencies and tentative expedients, were led to take advantage of the larger and mechanically more efficient devices of the new age would enjoy a differential advantage as against their conservative neighbors, and would in the end supplant them in the domain of statecraft and presently take over their substance, - the dynastic State being necessarily of a competitive, or rapacious, character, and free to use any expedient that comes to hand. It is a case of selective survival working out through the competitive manoeuvres of those who had the administration of the one and the other policy in hand.
When the state of the industrial arts had so extended the physical reach of civil administration and political strategy as definitively to make a large-scale national organisation practicable, the old order of self-sufficient petty principalities became impossible. This change reached the German territories at a later date than the rest of western Europe, and it did not take effect in a reorganisation of national life until so late a date that the retardation is a matter of surprise in spite of all the explanations offered by the historians.
But in consequence of this retardation the magnitude of the reorganisation, when it came, was also such as to leave the historians somewhat at a loss to account for it without recourse to race characteristics imputed ad hoc as well as to the magical effects of a nepotic predilection on the part of Providence.
By wise management on the part of the dynastic statesmen who have had the direction of policy and the control of the administrative machinery, the rapidly increasing material efficiency of the German community, due to the introduction of the modern state of the industrial arts, has successfully been turned to the use of the State, in a degree not approached elsewhere in western Europe; so that in effect the community stands to the Hohenzollern State somewhat in the relation of a dynastic estate, a quasi-manorial demesne or domain, to be administered for dynastic ends, very much after the fashion of the cameralistic administration of fiscal affairs in the territorial states of Germany a hundred years ago. This subservience of the community to dynastic ends and dynastic management has been secured in the gross by a policy of warlike aggression, and in detail by a system of bureaucratic surveillance and unremitting interference in the private life of subjects.
It goes without saying that there is no secure ground for such a scheme of dynastic usufruct and control except in the loyal support of popular sentiment; and it likewise goes without saying that such a state of popular sentiment can be maintained only by unremitting habituation, discipline sagaciously and relentlessly directed to this end. More particularly must the course of habituation to this end be persistent and unwavering if it is to hold the personal allegiance of a body of subjects exposed to the disintegrating discipline of modern life; where the machine industry constantly enforces the futility of personal force and prerogative in the face of wide-sweeping inanimate agencies and mechanical process, and where the ubiquitous haggling of the price system constantly teaches that every man is his own keeper. It is a matter of common notoriety that all this has been taken care of with unexampled thoroughness and effect under the Prussian rule.21 Chief of the agencies that have kept the submissive allegiance of the German people to the State intact is, of course, successful warfare, seconded by the disciplinary effects of warlike preparation and indoctrination with warlike arrogance and ambitions. The attention deliberately given to these concerns is also a fact of common notoriety; so much so, indeed, that the spokesmen of the system have come to take it for granted as a matter of course, and so are apt to overlook it. The experience of war induces a warlike frame of mind; and the pursuit of war, being an exercise in the following of one’s leader and execution of arbitrary orders, induces an animus of enthusiastic subservience and unquestioning obedience to authority. What is a military organisa-tion in war is a servile organisation in peace. The system is the same, and the popular animus requisite to its successful working is the same in either case. It reaches its best efficiency in either case, in war or peace, only when the habit of arbitrary authority and unquestioning obedience has been so thoroughly ingrained that subservience has become a passionate aspiration with the subject population, where the habit of allegiance has attained that degree of automatism that the subject’s ideal of liberty has come to be permission to obey orders, - somewhat after the fashion in which theologians interpret the freedom of the faithful, whose supreme privilege it is to fulfil all the divine commands. Such an ideal growth of patriotic sentiment appears to have been attained, in a tolerable degree of approximation, in the German case, if one is to credit the popular encomiasts, who explain that “duty,” in the sense indicated, combined with “freedom,” makes up the goal to which the German spirit aspires. “Duty,” of course, comprises the exercise of arbitrary command on the part of the superior as well as the obedience of the inferior, but such arbitrary authority is exercised only in due submission to higher authority, until it traces back to the dynastic head, - who, it would appear, in turn exercises only a delegated authority, vested in his person by divine grace.
The phrase, “dynastic State,” is here used in preference to “patrimonial State,” not because there is any substantial difference between the two conceptions, but rather because the later German spokesmen for the German State, as it is seen at work during the Imperial era, appear to have an aversion to the latter term, which they wish to apply to the territorial State of the pre-Imperial time, in contradistinction to the State as rehabilitated in the adoption of a constitution comprising