An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation

by Thorstein Veblen

The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine, servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into

lines of settled and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it all in the course of time came a feudal régime, under which personal allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal loyalty and service have coalesced,

to bring this people to that climax of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage; they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor, and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.

Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while, and why.

It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not lie within that perspective.

It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward, circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less, but by no means shorn of all—perhaps not of the major part—of that barbaric heritage.

Circumstances have so fallen out that these—typically the French and the English-speaking peoples—have left behind and partly forgotten that institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and move

and have their being. The French partly because they—that is the common people of the French lands—entered the procession with a very substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age. So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman—and perhaps pre-Roman—times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle (habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness, should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These appear yet incapable of dis

tinguishing between national shame and dynastic ambition.

By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection. So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen, that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion and an easy matter—as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and more moderate appraisal.