An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its PerpetuationVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation
Veblen, Thorstein
Peace; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.
To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
respect; very much after the fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
Glory are surrounded with a penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a
bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of
divinity begin. There is something of a coalescence.[7]
[Footnote 7: "To us the state is the most indispensable as well as the
highest requisite to our earthly existence.... All individualistic
endeavor ... must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim....
The state ... eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of all
the individuals within its jurisdiction." "This conception of the state,
which is as much a part of our life as is the blood in our veins, is
nowhere to be found in the English Constitution, and is quite foreign to
English thought, and to that of America as well."--Eduard Meyer,
_England, its Political Organisation and Development and the War against
Germany_, translated by H.S. White. Boston 1916. pp. 30-31.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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