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Updated: June 24, 2025
Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr. Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised sympathy for Bolshevism.
What an hour is, in the natural phenomena of every day, a decade or two is in the still more impressive spectacle of a sunrise in the world's history. TRANSLATED BY THORSTEIN B. VEBLEN, PH.D. Lecturer in Economics, University of Missouri Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court: I shall have to make my beginning with an appeal to your indulgence. My defense will go somewhat into detail.
Safer than rich food, less wasteful than gorgeous clothing, but, as Veblen truly says, "through discrimination in favor of visible consumption it has come about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby. As a consequence people habitually screen their private life from observation."
Veblen and other writers have revealed the various unperceived presuppositions of the traditional political economy, and now comes an Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge treatise on general sociology, devotes hundreds of pages to substantiating a similar thesis affecting all the social sciences.
Among the works referred to, I may mention two of great originality: a book filled with bold paradox by Thorstein Veblen, entitled Peace? An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace; a Russian play in four acts by Artsibashev, War, depicting the cycle of the war in a family and the wastage of souls which it involves. Finally we have vigorous drawings, the work of satirists of the pencil.
If patriotism fits into modern life like sand in the machinery, as Veblen says, we must see how patriotism may be made to do better service. Some views about patriotism which thus disparage it seem to be based upon a biological conception of it.
The tendency to miscellaneous observation we come by honestly enough, for we note it in many of our animal relatives. Veblen, however, uses the term "idle curiosity" somewhat ironically, as is his wont. It is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing from which almost all distinguished human achievement proceeds.
He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle."
What Veblen calls "the instinct of workmanship" grows on, slowly and irresistably; but the malign features of our industrial life are distinctively androcentric: the desire to get, of the hunter; interfering with the desire to give, of the mother; the desire to overcome an antagonist originally masculine, interfering with the desire to serve and benefit originally feminine.
Veblen charges the price system with being a fundamental cause of war, and says that it must now come up for radical examination and perhaps modification. The theory of the rights of property and contract which have been taken as axiomatic premises by economic science may itself fail, or at least be thrown open to question.
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