The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts

Thorstein Veblen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351480840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, originally issued in 1914, is described by Murray Murphey as his "most important work." In this volume that the theoretical foundations are put forth on full display. Veblen's juxtaposition of the instinctive values of community welfare in contrast to the pecuniary values of commercial exchange was the basis of his later, more famous works. The book makes plain Veblen's basic dichotomy between technological institutions for making goods and the pecuniary institutions for making money.

Veblen's book is taken up with the casual processes in the history of culture centered on human instincts and habits. For him, a change in the natural or social conditions produces effects only by changing the behavior of people. The whole panoply of habits, instincts, and motives, points to a theory of social and cultural change which substantially differs from the pragmatic tradition that swept America in the early decades of this century. Veblen makes so many unique contributions and insights that his work outlives the limitations of its theoretical shell.

As is the case for most Veblen's works, footnotes and references are sparse, no index is provided, and the reader is left to fill in the missing paraphernalia the way one does with a novel. Indeed, the reader is swept along Veblen's captivating rhetoric in seven brilliant chapters moving from the instincts in primitive technology, to the current state of industrial arts, to the examination of predatory culture invited to the civilizational table by the competitive system, and finally into a contrast of handicrafts and machine industry.

Veblen offers a dramaturgy and a morality of the industrial order of his time: much has changed, but a great deal remains the same and is easily identifiable by the discerning reader. In this passage through text and time, Murphey is the perfect guide, displaying a keen knowledge of philosophy, psychology

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

FOR mankind as for the other higher animals, the life of the species is conditioned by the complement of instinctive proclivities and tropismatic aptitudes with which the species is typically endowed. Not only is the continued life of the race dependent on the adequacy of its instinctive proclivities in this way, but the routine and details of its life are also, in the last resort, determined by these instincts. These are the prime movers in human behaviour, as in the behaviour of all those animals that show self-direction or discretion. Human activity, in so far as it can be spoken of as conduct, can never exceed the scope of these instinctive dispositions, by initiative of which man takes action. Nothing falls within the human scheme of things desirable to be done except what answers to these native proclivities of man. These native proclivities alone make anything worth while, and out of their working emerge not only the purpose and efficiency of life, but its substantial pleasures and pains as well.

Latterly the words “instinct” and “instinctive” are no longer well seen among students of those biological sciences where they once had a great vogue. Students who occupy themselves with the psychology of animal behaviour are cautiously avoiding these expressions, and in this caution they are doubtless well advised. For such use the word appears no longer to be serviceable as a technical term. It has lost the requisite sharp definition and consistency of connotation, apparently through disintegration under a more searching analysis than the phenomena comprised under this concept had previously been subjected to. In these biological sciences interest is centering not on the question of what activities may be set down to innate propensity or predisposition at large, but rather on the determination of the irreducible psychological:—and, indeed, physiological—elements that go to make up animal behaviour. For this purpose “instinct” is a concept of too lax and shifty a definition to meet the demands of exact biological science.

For the sciences that deal with the psychology of human conduct a similarly searching analysis of the elementary facts of behaviour is doubtless similarly desirable; and under such closer scrutiny of these facts it will doubtless appear that here, too, the broad term “instinct” is of too unprecise a character to serve the needs of an exhaustive psychological analysis. But the needs of an inquiry into the nature and causes of the growth of institutions are not precisely the same as those of such an exhaustive psychological analysis. A genetic inquiry into institutions will address itself to the growth of habits and conventions, as conditioned by the material environment and by the innate and persistent propensities of human nature; and for these propensities, as they take effect in the give and take of cultural growth, no better designation than the time-worn “instinct” is available.

In the light of recent inquiries and speculations it is scarcely to be questioned that each of these distinguishable propensities may be analysed into simpler constituent elements, of a quasi-tropismatic or physiological nature;¹ but in the light of every-day experience and common notoriety it is at the same time not to be questioned that these simple and irreducible psychological elements of human behaviour fall into composite functional groups, and so make up specific and determinate propensities, proclivities, aptitudes that are, within the purview of the social sciences, to be handled as irreducible traits of human nature. Indeed, it would appear that it is in the particular grouping and concatenation of these ultimate psychological elements into characteristic lines of interest and propensity that the nature of man is finally to be distinguished from that of the lower animals.

These various native proclivities that are so classed together as “instincts” have the characteristic in common that they all and several, more or less imperatively, propose an objective end of endeavour. On the other hand what distinguishes one instinct from another is that each sets up a characteristic purpose, aim, or object to be attained, different from the objective end of any other instinct. Instinctive action is teleological, consciously so, and the teleological scope and aim of each instinctive propensity differs characteristically from all the rest. The several instincts are teleological categories, and are, in colloquial usage, distinguished and classed on the ground of their teleological content. As the term is here used, therefore, and indeed as it is currently understood, the instincts are to be defined or described neither in mechanical terms of those anatomical or physiological aptitudes that causally underlie them or that come into action in the functioning of any given instinct, nor in terms of the movements of orientation or taxis involved in the functioning of each. The distinctive feature by the mark of which any given instinct is identified is to be found in the particular character of the purpose to which it drives.¹ “Instinct,” as contra-distinguished from tropismatic action, involves consciousness and adaptation to an end aimed at.

It is, of course, not hereby intended to set up or to prescribe a definition of “instinct” at large, but only to indicate as closely as may be what sense is attached to the term as here used. At the same time it is believed that this definition of the concept does violence neither to colloquial usage nor to the usage of such students as have employed the term in scientific discussion, particularly in discussion of the instinctive proclivities of mankind. But it is not to be overlooked that this definition of the term may be found inapplicable, or at least of doubtful service, when applied to those simpler and more immediate impulses that are sometimes by tradition spoken of as “instinctive,” even in human behaviour,— impulses that might with better effect be designated “tropismatic.” In animal behaviour, for instance, as well as in such direct and immediate impulsive human action as is fairly to be classed with animal behaviour, it is often a matter of some perplexity to draw a line between tropismatic activity and instinct. Notoriously, the activities commonly recognised as instinctive differ widely among themselves in respect of the degree of directness or immediacy with which the given response to stimulus takes place. They range in this respect all the way from such reactions as are doubtfully to be distinguished from simple reflex action on the one hand, to such as are doubtfully recognised as instinctive because of the extent to which reflection and deliberation enter into their execution on the other hand. By insensible gradation the lower (less complex and deliberate) instinctive activities merge into the class of unmistakable tropismatic sensibilities, without its being practicable to determine by any secure test where the one category should be declared to end and the other to begin.¹ Such quasi- tropismatic activities may be rated as purposeful by an observer, in the sense that they are seen to further the life of the individual agent or of the species, while there is no consciousness of purpose on the part of the agent under observation; whereas “instinct,” in the narrower and special sense to which it seems desirable to restrict the term for present use, denotes the conscious pursuit of an objective end which the instinct in question makes worth while.

The ends of life, then, the purposes to be achieved, are assigned by man’s instinctive proclivities; but the ways and means of accomplishing those things which the instinctive proclivities so make worth while are a matter of intelligence. It is a distinctive mark of mankind that the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by the other animals. But the dependence of the race on its endowment of instincts is no less absolute for this intervention of intelligence; since it is only by the prompting of instinct that reflection and deliberation come to be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope and method of intelligence in all this employment of it. Men take thought, but the human spirit, that is to say the racial endowment of instinctive proclivities, decides what they shall take thought of, and how and to what effect.

Yet the dependence of the scheme of life on the complement of instinctive proclivities hereby becomes less immediate, since a more or less extended logic of ways and means comes to intervene between the instinctively given end and its realisation; and the lines of relation between any given instinctive proclivity and any particular feature of human conduct are by so much the more devious and round-about and the more difficult to trace. The higher the degree of intelligence and the larger the available body of knowledge current in any given community, the more extensive and elaborate will be the logic of ways and means interposed between these impulses and their realisation, and the more multifarious and complicated will be the apparatus of expedients and resources employed to compass those ends that are instinctively worth while.

This apparatus of ways and means available for the pursuit of whatever may be worth seeking is, substantially all, a matter of tradition out of the past, a legacy of habits of thought accumulated through the experience of past generations. So that the maimer, and in a great degree the measure, in which the instinctive ends of life are worked out under any given cultural situation is somewhat closely conditioned by these elements of habit, which so fall into shape as an accepted scheme of life. The instinctive proclivities are essentially simple and look directly to the attainment of some concrete objective end; but in detail the ends so sought are many and diverse, and the ways and means by which they may be sought are similarly diverse and various, involving endless recourse to expedients, adaptations, and concessive adjustment between several proclivities that are all sufficiently urgent.

Under the discipline of habituation this logic and apparatus of ways and means falls into conventional lines, acquires the consistency of custom and prescription, and so takes on an institutional character and force. The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only become an habitual matter of course, easy and obvious, but they come likewise to be sanctioned by social convention, and so become right and proper and give rise to principles of conduct. By use and wont they are incorporated into the current scheme of common sense. As elements of the approved scheme of conduct and pursuit these conventional ways and means take their place as proximate ends of endeavour. Whence, in the further course of unremitting habituation, as the attention is habitually focussed on these proximate ends, they occupy the interest to such an extent as commonly to throw their own ulterior purpose into the background and often let it be lost sight of; as may happen, for instance, in the acquisition and use of money. It follows that in much of human conduct these proximate ends alone are present in consciousness as the object of interest and the goal of endeavour, and certain conventionally accepted ways and means come to be set up as definitive principles of what is right and good; while the ulterior purpose of it all is only called to mind occasionally, if at all, as an afterthought, by an effort of reflection.¹

Among psychologists who have busied themselves with these questions there has hitherto been no large measure of agreement as to the number of specific instinctive proclivities that so are native to man; nor is there any agreement as to the precise functional range and content ascribed to each. In a loose way it is apparently taken for granted that these instincts are to be conceived as discrete and specific elements in human nature, each working out its own determinate functional content without greatly blending with or being diverted by the working of its neighbours in that spiritual complex into which they all enter as constituent elements.² For the purposes of an exhaustive psychological analysis it is doubtless expedient to make the most of such discreteness as is observable among the instinctive proclivities. But for an inquiry into the scope and method of their working-out in the growth of institutions it is perhaps even more to the purpose to take note of how and with what effect the several instinctive proclivities cross, blend, overlap, neutralise or reenforce one another.

The most convincing genetic view of these phenomena throws the instinctive proclivities into close relation with the tropismatic sensibilities and brings them, in the physiological respect, into the same general class with the latter.¹ If taken uncritically and in general terms this view would seem to carry the implication that the instincts should be discrete and discontinuous among themselves somewhat after the same fashion as the tropismatic sensibilities with which they are in great measure bound up; but on closer scrutiny such a genetic theory of the instincts does not appear to enforce the view that they are to be conceived as effectually discontinuous or mutually exclusive, though it may also not involve the contrary,—that they make a continuous or ambiguously segmented body of spiritual elements. The recognised tropisms stand out, to all appearance, as sharply defined physiological traits, transmissible by inheritance intact and unmodified, separable and unblended, in a manner suggestively like the “unit characters” spoken of in latter day theories of heredity.²

While the instinctive sensibilities may not be explained as derivatives of the tropisms, there is enough of similarity in the working of the two to suggest that the two classes of phenomena must both be accounted for on somewhat similar physiological grounds. The simple and more narrowly defined instinctive dispositions, which have much of the appearance of immediate reflex nervous action and automatically defined response, lend themselves passably to such an interpretation,—as, for example, the gregarious instinct, or the instinct of repulsion with its accompanying emotion of disgust. Such as these are shared by mankind with the other higher animals on a fairly even footing; and these are relatively simple, immediate, and not easily sophisticated or offset by habit. These seem patently to be of much the same nature as the tropismatic sensibilities; though even in these simpler instinctive dispositions the characteristic quasi-tropismatic sensibility distinctive of each appears to be complicated with obscure stimulations of the nerve centres arising out of the functioning of one or another of the viscera. And what is true of the simpler instincts in this respect should apply to the vaguer and more complex instincts also, but with a larger allowance for a more extensive complication of visceral and organic stimuli.

Whether these subconscious stimulations of the nerve centres through the functioning of the viscera are to be conceived in terms of tropismatic reaction is a difficult question which has had little attention hitherto. But in any case, whatever the expert students of these phenomena may have to say of this matter, the visceral or organic stimuli engaged in any one of the instinctive sensibilities are apparently always more than one and are usually somewhat complex. Indeed, while it seems superficially an easy matter to refer any one of the simple instincts directly to some certain one of the viscera as the main or primary source from which its appropriate stimulation comes to the nerve centres, it is by no means easy to decide what one or more of the viscera, or of the other organs that are not commonly classed as viscera, will have no part in the matter.

It results that, on physiological grounds, the common run of human instincts are not to be conceived as severally discrete and elementary proclivities. The same physiological processes enter in some measure, though in varying proportions, into the functioning of each. In instinctive action the individual acts as a whole, and in the conduct which emerges under the driving force of these instinctive dispositions the part which each several instinct plays is a matter of more or less, not of exclusive direction. They must therefore incontinently touch, blend, overlap and interfere, and can not be conceived as acting each and several in sheer isolation and independence of one another. The relations of give and take among the several instinctive dispositions, therefore—of inosculation, “contamination” and cross purposes—are presumably slighter and of less consequence for the simpler and more apparently tropismatic impulses while on the other hand the less specific and vaguer instinctive predispositions, such as the parental bent or the proclivity to construction or acquisition, will be so comprehensively and intricately bound in a web of correlation and inter-dependence—will so unremittingly contaminate, offset or fortify one another, and have each so large and yet so shifting a margin of common ground with all the rest—that hard and fast lines of demarcation can scarcely be drawn between them. The best that can practically be had in the way of a secure definition will be a descriptive characterisation of each distinguishable propensity, together with an indication of the more salient and consequential ramifications by which each contaminates or is contaminated by the working of other propensities that go to make up that complex of instinctive dispositions that constitutes the spiritual nature of the race. So that the schemes of definition that have hitherto been worked out are in great part to be taken as arrangements of convenience, serviceable apparatus for present use, rather than distinctions enforced at all points by an equally sharp substantial discreteness of the facts.¹

This fact, that in some measure the several instincts spring from a common ground of sentient life, that they each engage the individual as a whole, has serious consequences in the domain of habit, and therefore it counts for much in the growth of civilisation and in the everyday conduct of affairs. The physiological apparatus engaged in the functioning of any given instinct enters in part, though in varying measure, into the working of some or of any other instinct; whereby, even on physiological grounds alone, the habituation that touches the functioning of any given instinct must, in a less degree but pervasively, affect the habitual conduct of the same agent when driven by any other instinct. So that on this view the scope of habit, in so far as it bears on the instinctive activities, is necessarily wider than the particular concrete line of conduct to which the habituation in question is due.

The instincts are hereditary traits. In the current theories of heredity they would presumably be counted as secondary characteristics of the species, as being in a sense by-products of the physiological activities that give the species its specific character; since these theories in the last resort run in physiological terms. So the instinctive dispositions would scarcely be accounted unit characters, in the Mendelian sense, but would rather count as spiritual traits emerging from a certain concurrence of physiological unit characters and varying somewhat according to variations in the complement of unit characters to which the species or the individual may owe his constitution. Hence would arise variations of individuality among the members of the race, resting in some such manner as has just been suggested on the varying endowment of instincts, and running back through these finally to recondite differences of physiological function. Some such account of the instinctive dispositions and their relation to the physical individual seems necessary as a means of apprehending them and their work without assuming a sheer break between the physical and the immaterial phenomena of life.

Characteristic of the race is a degree of vagueness or generality, an absence of automatically determinate response, a lack of concrete eventuality as it might be called, in the common run of human instincts. This vague...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introductory Note
• Chapter I Introductory
• Chapter II Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology
• Chapter III The Savage State of the Industrial Arts
• Chapter IV The Technology of the Predatory Culture
• Chapter V Ownership and the Competitive System
• Chapterr VI The Era of Handicraft
• Chapterr VII The Machine Industry