The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

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It is not practicable to assign a hard and fast date from which this modern era began, with its peculiar scheme of economic life and the economic conceptions that characterise it. The date will vary from one country to another, and even from one industrial class to another within the same country. But it can be said that historically the modern era begins with the rise of handicraft; it is along the line of growth marked out by the development of handicraft that the modern technology has emerged, together with that industrial organisation and those pecuniary conceptions of economic efficiency and serviceability that have gradually come to their current state of maturity on the ground afforded by this technology. What historically lies back of the era of handicraft is not of a piece with the economic situation of modern times; nor is it characteristic of the Western civilisation, as contrasted with the agricultural and predatory civilisations of antiquity.

As indicated in an earlier chapter, in speaking of the decay of the predatory (feudalistic) régime and its servile agricultural organisation of industry, when peace and order supervene the instinct of workmanship by insensible degrees and in an uncertain measure supplants the invidious self-regarding sentiments that actuate the life of prowess and servility characteristic of that culture; so that workmanship comes again into the foreground among the instinctive propensities that shape the community’s habitual interest and so bend the course of its institutional growth and determine the bias of its common sense.

The habitual outlook and the bias given by the handicraft system are of a twofold character—technological and pecuniary. The craftsman was an artificer engaged in mechanical operations, working with tools of which he had the mastery, and employing mechanical processes the mysteries of which were familiar to his everyday habits of thought; but from the beginning of the era of handicraft and throughout his industrial life he was also more or less of a trader. He stood in close relation with some form of market, and his proficiency as a craftsman was brought to a daily practical test in the sale of his wares or services, no less than in the workmanlike fashioning of them. Also, the price as well as the workmanlike quality of the goods presently became subject of regulation under the rules of the crafts; and the petty trade which grew up as an occupation accessory to the handicraft industry was itself organised on lines analogous to the crafts proper and was regulated by similar principles; the trader’s work being accounted serviceable, or productive, in the same general sense as that of any other craftsman and being recognised as equitably entitling those who pursued it to a fair livelihood.

The handicraft system was an organised and regulated system of workmanship and self-help; and under the conditions imposed by its technology proficiency in the latter respect was no less indispensable and no less to the purpose than in the former. Both counted equally and in combination toward the successful working of the system, which is a practicable plan of economic life only so long as the craftsmen combine both of these capacities in good force and only so long as the technological exigencies admit the exercise of both in conjunction. The system broke down so soon as the state of the industrial arts no longer enabled the workmen to acquire the necessary technological proficiency and do the required work at the same time that they each and several were able to oversee and pursue their individual pecuniary interests. With the coming on of a wider and more extensively differentiated technological scheme, and with wider and remoter market relations, due in the main to increased facilities of transportation, these necessary conditions of a practicable handicraft economy gradually failed, and the practice of industrial investments and the larger commerce then gradually supplanted it.

The discipline of everyday life under the handicraft economy was a discipline in pecuniary self-help as well as in workmanship. In the popular ideal as well as in point of practical fact the complete craftsman stood shrewdly on his individual proficiency in maintaining his own pecuniary advantage, as well as on his trained workmanship; and the gilds were organised to maintain the craft’s advantages in the market, as well as to regulate the quality of the output. The craft rules governing the quality of the output of goods were in the main enforced with a view to the maintenance of price, and so with a view to securing an adequate livelihood for the craftsmen. Efficiency in the crafts came in this way presently to be counted very much as the modern “efficiency engineers” would count it,—proximately in terms of mechanical performance, ultimately in terms of price, and more particularly in terms of net gain. So that the habits of life ingrained in the gildsman, and in the community at large where the gild system prevailed, comprised as a main fact a meticulous regard for details of ownership and for pecuniary claims and obligations. It is out of this insistent, pervasive, and minutely concrete discipline in the practice and logic of pecuniary detail that there have arisen those “natural rights” of property and those “business principles” that have been taken over by the later era of the machine industry and capitalistic investment.

The rules of the gild, as well as the larger legislative provisions that had to do with gild regulations, were avowedly drawn with a view to securing the gildsman in a fair customary livelihood, and the measures logically adopted to this end were designed to secure him in the enjoyment and disposal of the returns of his work as well as in his right to pursue his trade within the rules laid down for the collective welfare by the gild. With due training in this logic of the handicraft system it became a plain matter of common sense that the craftsman should equitably be entitled to whatever he can get for his work under the conventionally settled rules of the trade, and should be free to make the most of his capacities in all that pertains to his pursuit of a livelihood; and the like principles (habits of thought) apply to the traffic of the petty trade; which, being presently interpreted in terms of contract and investment, has come to mean the right to do business and to enjoy and dispose of the returns from all bargains made in due form.

Presently, as the technological situation gradually changed its character through extensions and specialisation in appliances and processes—perhaps especially through changes in the means of communication and in the density of population—the handicraft system with its petty trade outgrew itself and broke down in a new phase of the pecuniary culture. The increasingly wide differentiation between workmanship and salesmanship grew into a “division of labour” between industry and business, between industrial and pecuniary occupations,—a disjunction of ownership and its peculiar cares, privileges and proficiency from workmanship. By this division of labour, or divergence of function, a fraction of the community came to specialise in ownership and pecuniary traffic, and so came to constitute a business community occupied with pecuniary affairs, running along beside the industrial community proper, with a development of practices and usages peculiar to its own needs and bearing only indirectly on the further development of the industrial system or on the state of the industrial arts.

Master-workmen with means would employ other workmen without means, and might or might not themselves continue to work at the trade. Petty traders or hucksters, nominally members of some craft gild, would grow wealthy with the increasing volume of traffic and would organise a more and more extensive household (sweatshop) industry to meet the increasing demands of their market; or they might become jobbers, carry on more far-reaching trade operations over a longer term, withdraw more distantly from the actual work of the craft, and in the course of a generation or two (as, e. g., the Fuggers) would grow into merchant princes and financiers who maintained but a remote and impersonal relation to the crafts. Or, again, the associated merchants (as, e. g., those of the Hansa) would establish depots and agents, “factories,” that would gradually assemble something of a working force of craftsmen to sort, warehouse and finish the products which they handled, at the same time that they would exercise an increasingly close and extensive oversight of the industries from which these products were derived; until these depots, under the management of the factors, in some cases grew into factories in somewhat the modern acceptance of the term. In one way and another this trading or huckstering traffic, which had been intimately associated with the handicraft industry and gild life, branched off in the course of time as the industries advanced to a larger scale and a more extensive specialisation; and this increasing “division of labour” between workmanship and salesmanship led presently to such a segregation of the traders out of the body of craftsmen as to give rise to a business community devoted to pecuniary management alone.

But the principles on which the new and larger business was conducted were the same as those on which the earlier petty trade had been carried on, and therefore the same in point of derivation and tenor as had been worked out by long experience within the handicraft system proper. Business traffic was an outgrowth of the handicraft system, and it was in as secure a position in respect of legitimacy and legal and customary guaranty as the industrial system from which its principles were derived and from which its gains were drawn.