The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
Socialism, in the sense in which the word connotes a subversion of the
economic foundations of modern culture, appears to be found only
sporadically and uncertainly outside the limits, in time and space, of
the discipline exercised by the modern mechanical, non-pecuniary
occupations. This state of the case need of course not be due solely to
the disciplinary effects of the industrial employments, nor even solely
to effects traceable to those employments whether in the way of
disciplinary results, selective development, or what not. Other factors,
particularly factors of an ethnic character, seem to cooeperate to the
result indicated; but, so far as evidence bearing on the point is yet in
hand and has been analysed, it indicates that this differentiation of
occupations is a necessary requisite to the growth of a consistent body
of socialistic sentiment; and the indication is also that wherever this
differentiation prevails in such a degree of accentuation and affects
such considerable and compact bodies of people as to afford ground for a
consistent growth of common sentiment, a result is some form of
iconoclastic socialism. The differentiation may of course have a
selective as well as a disciplinary effect upon the population affected,
and an off-hand separation of these two modes of influence can of course
not be made. In any case, the two modes of influence seem to converge to
the outcome indicated; and, for the present purpose of illustration
simply, the tracing out of the two strands of sequence in the case
neither can nor need be undertaken. By force of this differentiation, in
one way and another, the industrial classes are learning to think in
terms of material cause and effect, to the neglect of prescription and
conventional grounds of validity; just as, in a faintly incipient way,
the economists are also learning to do in their discussion of the life
of these classes. The resulting decay of the popular sense of
conventional validity of course extends to other matters than the
pecuniary conventions alone, with the outcome that the socialistically
affected industrial classes are pretty uniformly affected with an
effortless iconoclasm in other directions as well. For the discipline to
which their work and habits of life subject them gives not so much a
training away from the pecuniary conventions, specifically, as a
positive and somewhat unmitigated training in methods of observation and
inference proceeding on grounds alien to all conventional validity. But
the practical experiment going on in the specialisation of discipline,
in the respect contemplated, appears still to be near its beginning, and
the growth of aberrant views and habits of thought due to the peculiar
disciplinary trend of this late and unprecedented specialisation of
occupations has not yet had time to work itself clear.
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