Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution

Answers

• Q33CIVILIZATION

  Can a society adopt another society's machinery without adopting its ways of life?

  Yes. in the short run, no in the long run. Germany borrowed English machine technology without the English institutions that grew up with it, which let a dynastic state use it; Veblen holds that the machine discipline will erode those older institutions over time.

  Summary disputed by reviewer: Veblen presents the erosion of the dynastic state as 'at least conceivable' and not yet realized, which is weaker than the summary's 'will erode'.

  It was this dynastic power of the Prussian State, resting on an authentic tradition of personal fealty, unlimited in the last resort, that was the largest single factor of a cultural kind entering into the Imperial era from the German side. It is at least conceivable that in the course of time, the protracted disintegrating impact of the discipline exercised by modern industrial habits would have brought this dynastic State and its coercive organisation to much the same state of decay as that which once overtook its smaller and feebler counterpart in Elizabethan England. But the course of time has not had a chance to run in this Prussian case. Elizabethan England, and its soaring imperialistic aspirations, was exposed to the slow corrosion of peace and isolation, with the comjmon interest converging more and more on the industrial arts and the fortunes of trade; and it took a hundred years and more to displace dynastic statecraft and eliminate imperialist politics — in so far as these ele- ments of the ancient regime can be said to have been lost — and it took another two-hundred years to reach the farthest point along the line of liberal policy and peaceable ideals eventually attained by the English community.

  Internet Archive catalogue page; McMaster history of economic thought PDF; Wikipedia 'Backwardness' summary of the borrowing argument.