Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

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      Chapter III.

       The Dynastic State

       Table of Contents

      What befel the Germanic peoples through the ages that lie between prehistoric paganism and the late-modern period, whether within their ancient habitat on the Baltic seaboard, or abroad in those seats of conquest and immigration that have since come to be spoken of as the Fatherland, - all that does not concern this inquiry. Just as the particular fortunes of these peoples in prehistoric antiquity have also no interest in this connection, except as the recital may serve to show what is the hereditary racial bent of this population that so lived and thrived under that archaic state of culture. That they did so live and thrive goes to prove that that archaic culture, and the state of the industrial arts in which it was grounded, were suited to their temperamental bent. This hereditary type of human nature, so shown in the working-out of this characteristic culture of pagan antiquity, is of interest in this connection because it is the same human nature with which these peoples today go to their work of getting a living under the conditions offered by the technology of today.

      A summary paragraph in the way of a conspectus may therefore be in place. By and large, all these north-European peoples that live within the climatic region of the Baltic-North Sea littoral are of one racial complexion, irrespective of language or nationality. They are all of a composite derivation, a hybrid population made up of some three (or more) racial stocks, with minor contingents thrown in sporadically; the composition of this population varying only by negligible differences from west to east, and varying north and south after a systematic fashion, in respect of the relative proportion in which the several racial constituents enter in the hybrid mixture, - always with the reservation that for the immediate purpose this characterisation need apply only within the climatic region of the Baltic and North Sea. The population of these countries has, therefore, the wide range of individual variability that belongs to a hybrid stock. But even this wide variability, which goes far to give a facile adaptiveness of the people to novel and even to alien conditions, runs after all within certain broad, selectively determined lines, and does not set aside the effectual long-term assertion of a certain, flexible but indefeasible, general drift or generic type of human nature that runs through the whole of these populations, - the tone-giving traits of this type of human nature being those that show themselves in that archaic civilisation which the Baltic peoples worked out during that early period of their racial life-history when they made good their survival. This period of prehistory has been the only phase in the experience of this population that has lasted long enough under passably stable conditions to exert anything like a definitively selective effect, and so to test what they are fit for and what is fit for them. This archaic culture, which so may be said, by selective test, to be congenital to the north-Europeans, will, on its technological side, typi-cally have been of the character of the neolithic, rather than anything else that can be given a specific name; while in point of its domestic, social and civil institutions it may be called a conventionalised anarchy, in the sense that it lacks formal provision for a coercive control, and is drawn on a sufficiently small scale to make it workable by exercise of a tolerant neighborhood surveillance. The like characterisation applies also to the religious cult, and presumptively to the underlying religious conceptions, so far as the available evidence goes. When the polity of this pagan culture finally broke down after many vicissitudes, its place was taken by a predatory organisation that developed into the feudal system among those warlike and piratical migrants that settled in the outlying countries of Europe; while among the population left at home in the Baltic-Scandinavian countries it was presently replaced by a coercive scheme of government of somewhat the same character, constructed in imitation of feudalism.

      Particular attention has here been directed to the hybrid derivation of these peoples, and to the fact that the racial composition of this population has not varied in any serious degree since the initial settlement of the Baltic-North Sea littoral in neolithic times; with the possible qualification that the infusion of the brachycephalic-brunet stock into the mixture may have taken effect after the first settlement, although its coming falls also in neolithic times. It results from this state of their racial composition that there is today substantially no hereditary difference between different nationalities within this climatic region, or between the dif-ferent social classes that make up any one of these nationalities.

      Their hybrid composition gives also an extremely large facility for the acceptance of novel ideas from outside, together with a wide range of adaptation in all the arts of life, both in technological matters and as regards the scheme of civil and social institutions and the currency of religious and intellectual conceptions. At the same time the same individual variability of the hybrid acts to hinder any given scheme or system of accepted use and wont from attaining a definitive stability; in such a population no system of knowledge, belief, usage, or control can achieve that degree of authenticity and fixity that will make it break rather than bend under the impact of new exigencies that may arise out of technological changes or out of contact with an alien culture; in so much that no scheme of usage and convictions can be devised which will, even with a reasonable margin of tolerance, fall nicely in with the temperamental bent of all, or virtually all, the individuals comprised under it. Therefore, in a population of this character, any comprehensive scheme of use and wont, of knowledge and belief, will in effect necessarily be in some degree provisional; it will necessarily rest on acceptance (in some part concessive acceptance) by a majority of the individuals concerned, rather than on a uniform and unqualified spontaneous consensus of the entire population that lives under its rule. The acceptance accorded such a standard scheme by this effective majority is also necessarily in some appreciable measure an acceptance by consent rather than by free initiative.

      That such is the case is evident in any one of the revolutionary changes that have passed over the peoples of Christendom during the historical period; as, e.g., in the growth of feudalism and in the later development of a dynastic state, together with the subsequent shift to a constitutional basis, where that change has been carried out; so also in the gradual acceptance and subsequent growth of the Christian cult and its ecclesiastical dominion, together with the many incidental adventures in religious dissent, and in the variegated outcome of them.

      This latter category, the adventures of the religious cult among the north-Europeans, affords perhaps the most felicitous illustration available of the working of such temperamental СКАЧАТЬ