The Theory of Business Enterprise. Thorstein Veblen

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СКАЧАТЬ physical basis of modern business traffic is the machine process, as described in Chapter II. It is essentially a modern fact, - late and yet in its early stages of growth, especially as regards its wider sweep in the organization of the industrial system. The spiritual ground of business enterprise, on the other hand, is given by the institution of ownership. "Business principles" are corollaries under the main proposition of ownership; they are principles of property, - pecuniary principles. These principles are of older date than the machine industry, although their full development belongs within the machine era. As the machine process conditions the growth and scope of industry, and as its discipline inculcates habits of thought suitable to the industrial technology, so the exigencies of ownership condition the growth and aims of business, and the discipline of ownership and its management inculcates views and principles (habits of thought) suitable to the work of business traffic.

      The discipline of the machine process enforces a standardization of conduct and of knowledge in terms of quantitative precision, and inculcates a habit of apprehending and explaining facts in terms of material cause and effect. It involves a valuation of facts, things, relations, and even personal capacity, in terms of force. Its metaphysics is materialism and its point of view is that of causal sequence.³⁸ Such a habit of mind conduces to industrial efficiency, and the wide prevalence of such a habit is indispensable to a high degree of industrial efficiency under modern conditions. This habit of mind prevails most widely and with least faltering in those communities that have achieved great things in the machine industry, being both a cause and an effect of the machine process.

      Other norms of standardization, more or less alien to this one, and other grounds for the valuation of facts, have prevailed elsewhere, as well as in the earlier phases of the Western culture. Much of this older standardization still stands over, in varying degrees of vigor or decay, in that current scheme of knowledge and conduct that now characterizes the Western culture. Many of these ancient norms of thought which have come down from the discipline of remote and relatively primitive phases of the cultural past are still strong in the affections of men, although most of them have lost greatly in their power of constraint. They no longer bind men's convictions as they once did. They are losing their axiomatic character. They are no longer self-evident or self-legitimating to modern common sense, as they once were to the common sense of an earlier time.

      These ancient norms differ from the modern norms given by the machine in that they rest on conventional, ultimately sentimental grounds; they are of a putative nature. Such are, e.g., the principles of (primitive) blood relationship, clan solidarity, paternal descent, Levitical cleanness, divine guidance, allegiance, nationality. In their time and under the circumstances which favored their growth these were, all and several, powerful factors in controlling human conduct and shaping the course of events. In their time each of these institutional norms served as a definitive ground of authentication for such facts as fell under its particular scope, and the scope of each was very wide in the day of its best vigor. As time has brought change of circumstances, the facts of life have gradually escaped from the constraint of these ancient principles; so that the dominion which they now hold over the life of civilized men is relatively slight and shifty.

      It is among these transmitted institutional habits of thought that the ownership of property belongs. It rests on the like general basis of use and wont. The binding relation of property to its owner is of a conventional, putative character. But while these other conventional norms cited above are in their decline, this younger one of the inherited institutions stands forth without apology and shows no apprehension of being crowded into the background of sentimental reminiscence.

      In absolute terms the institution of ownership is ancient, no doubt; but it is young compared with blood-relationship, the state, or the immortal gods. Especially is it true that its fuller development is relatively late. Not until a comparatively late date in West European history has ownership come to be emancipated from all restrictions of a non-pecuniary character and to stand in a wholly impersonal position, without admixture of personal responsibility or class prerogative.³⁹ Freedom and inviolability of contract has not until recently been the unbroken rule. Indeed, it has not even yet been accepted without qualification and extended to all items owned. There still are impediments in the way of certain transfers and certain contracts, and there are exemptions in favor of property held by certain privileged persons, and especially by certain sacred corporations. This applies particularly to the more backward peoples; but nowhere is the "cash nexus" free from all admixture of alien elements. Ownership is not all-pervading and all-dominant, but it pervades and dominates the affairs of civilized peoples more freely and widely than any other single ground of action, and more than it has ever done before. The range and number of relations and duties that are habitually disposed of on a pecuniary footing are greater than in the past, and a pecuniary settlement is final to a degree unknown in the past. The pecuniary norm has invaded the domain of the older institutions, such as blood-relationship, citizenship, or the church, so that obligations belonging under the one or the other of these may now be assessed and fulfilled in terms of a money payment, although the notion of a pecuniary liquidation seems to have been wholly remote from the range of ideas - habits of thought - on which these relations and duties were originally based.

      This is not the place for research into the origin and the primitive phases of ownership, nor even for inquiry into the views of property current in the early days of the Western culture. But the views current on this head at present - the principles which guide men's thinking and roughly define the right limits of discretion in pecuniary matters - this common-sense apprehension of what are the proper limits, rights, and responsibilities of ownership, is an outgrowth of the traditions, experiences, and speculations of past generations. Therefore some notice of the character of these traditional views and the circumstances out of which they have arisen in the recent past is necessary to an understanding of the part which they play in modern life.⁴⁰ The theory of property professed at a given time and in a given cultural region shows what is the habitual attitude of men, for the time being, on questions of ownership; for any theory that gains widespread and uncritical acceptance must carry a competent formulation of the deliverances of common sense on the matter with which it deals. Otherwise it will not be generally accepted. And such a commonplace view is in its turn an outcome of protracted experience on the part of the community.

      The modern theories of property run back to Locke,⁴¹ or to some source which for the present purpose is equivalent to Locke; who, on this as on other institutional questions, has been proved by the test of time to be a competent spokesman for modern culture in these premises. A detailed examination of how the matter stood in the theoretical respect before Locke, and whence, and by what process of selection and digestion, Locke derived his views, would lead too far afield. The theory is sufficiently familiar, for in substance it is, and for the better part of two centuries has been, held as an article of common sense by nearly all men who have spoken for the institution of property, with the exception of some few and late doubters.⁴²

      This modern European, common-sense theory says that ownership is a "Natural Right." What a man has made, whatsoever "he hath mixed his labor with," that he has thereby made his property. It is his to do with it as he will. He has extended to the object of his labor that discretionary control which in the nature of things he of right exercises over the motions of his own person. It is his in the nature of things by virtue of his having made it. "Thus labor, in the beginning, gave a right of property." The personal force, the functional efficiency of the workman shaping material facts to human use, is in this doctrine accepted as the definitive, axiomatic ground of ownership; behind this the argument does not penetrate, except it be to trace the workman's creative efficiency back to its ulterior source in the creative efficiency of the Deity, the "Great Artificer." With the early spokesmen of natural rights, whether they speak for ownership or for other natural rights, it is customary to rest the case finally on the creator's discretionary dispositions and workmanlike efficiency. But the reference of natural rights back to the choice and creative work of the Deity has, even in Locke, an air of being in some degree perfunctory; and later in the life-history of the natural-rights doctrine it falls into abeyance; whereas the central СКАЧАТЬ