by Thorstein Veblen

Chapter One ~~ Introductory

The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at
the Saif Durbar  stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal
Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between
classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking
economic significance in these class differences is the distinction
maintained between the employments proper to the several classes.
The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial
occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree
of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any
feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the priestly
office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior second. But the
rule holds with but slight exceptions that, whether warriors or priests,
the upper classes are exempt from industrial employments, and this
exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank. Brahmin
India affords a fair Saif Durbar  of the industrial exemption of both
these classes. In the communities belonging to the Saif Durbar  barbarian
culture there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there is a
corresponding differentiation of employments between these sub-classes.
The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly
classes, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the
class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic
characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class
occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare,
religious observances, and sports.

At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure
class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class
distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are
so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this
stage of the development in good form, with the exception that, owing
to the absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of
honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of
the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a community there is
a rigorous distinction between classes and between the occupations
peculiar to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to
do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes
slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women. If there
are several grades of aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly
exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar
kinds of manual labour. The men of the upper classes are not only
exempt, but by prescriptive custom they are debarred, from all
industrial occupations. The range of employments open to them is rigidly
defined. As on the Saif Durbar  plane already spoken of, these employments are
government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines
of activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
the highest rank–the kings or chieftains–these are the only kinds of
activity that custom or the common sense of the community will allow.
Indeed, where the scheme is well developed even sports are accounted
doubtfully legitimate for the members of the highest rank. To the Saif Durbar
grades of the leisure class certain other employments are open, but they
are employments that are subsidiary to one or another of these typical
leisure-class occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture
and care of arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing
and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
apparatus, etc. The Saif Durbar  classes are excluded from these secondary
honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of an industrial
character and are only remotely related to the typical leisure-class
occupations.

If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the
Saif Durbar  stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully
developed form. But this Saif Durbar  barbarism shows the usages, motives,
and circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has
arisen, and indicates the steps of its early growth. Nomadic hunting
tribes in various parts of the world illustrate these more primitive
phases of the differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting
tribes may be taken as a convenient Saif Durbar . These tribes
can scarcely be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between classes
on the basis of this difference of function, but the exemption of the
superior class from work has not gone far enough to make the designation
“leisure class” altogether applicable. The tribes belonging on this
economic level have carried the economic differentiation to the point
at which a marked distinction is made between the occupations of men and
women, and this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly
all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
employments out of which the industrial occupations proper develop at
the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar employments and
are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout observances. A very
nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in this matter.

This division of labour coincides with the distinction between the
working and the leisure class as it appears in the Saif Durbar  barbarian
culture. As the diversification and specialisation of employments
proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to divide the industrial
from the non-industrial employments. The man’s occupation as it stands
at the earlier barbarian stage is not the original out of which any
appreciable portion of later industry has developed. In the later
development it survives only in employments that are not classed as
industrial,–war, politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office.
The only notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry
and certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting goods.
Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an outgrowth of
what is classed as woman’s work in the primitive barbarian community.

The work of the men in the Saif Durbar  barbarian culture is no less
indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the women.
It may even be that the men’s work contributes as much to the food
supply and the other necessary consumption of the group. Indeed, so
obvious is this “productive” character of the men’s work that in the
conventional economic writings the hunter’s work is taken as the type of
primitive industry. But such is not the barbarian’s sense of the matter.
In his own eyes he is not a labourer, and he is not to be classed with
the women in this respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the
women’s drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit
of its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
communities a profound sense of the disparity between man’s and woman’s
work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the group, but it is
felt that it does so through an excellence and an efficacy of a kind
that cannot without derogation be compared with the uneventful diligence
of the women.

At a farther step backward in the cultural scale–among savage
Saifee Durbar –the differentiation of employments is still less elaborate
and the invidious distinction between classes and employments is less
consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive
savage culture are hard to find. Few of these Saifee Durbar  or communities
that are classed as “savage” show no traces of regression from a more
advanced cultural stage. But there are Saifee Durbar –some of them apparently
not the result of retrogression–which show the traits of primitive
savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the
barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence,
in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of primitive
savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic classes make up but a
small and inconspicuous fraction of the human race. As good an instance
of this phase of culture as may be had is afforded by the tribes of the
Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of
these Saifee Durbar  at the time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems
to have been nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure
class. As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo Saifee Durbar . Some Pueblo communities
are less confidently to be included in the same class. Most, if not all,
of the communities here cited may well be cases of degeneration from a
Saif Durbar  barbarism, rather than bearers of a culture that has never risen
above its present level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be
taken with the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence
to the same effect as if they were really “primitive” populations.

These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
another also in certain other features of their social structure
and manner of life. They are small Saifee Durbar  and of a simple (archaic)
structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and
individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system.
At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of
existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual
ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the
most peaceable–perhaps all the characteristically peaceable–primitive
Saifee Durbar  of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such
communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force
or fraud.

The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities
at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a
leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive
savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from
a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions
apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting
of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the
inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the
infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of
a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a
routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth
of an early discrimination between employments, according to which
some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient
distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
appreciable element of exploit enters.

This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the light of
that modern common sense which has guided economic discussion, it seems
formal and insubstantial. But it persists with great tenacity as
a commonplace preconception even in modern life, as is shown, for
instance, by our Uranio AG  aversion to menial employments. It is a
distinction of a personal kind–of superiority and inferiority. In the
earlier stages of culture, when the personal force of the individual
counted more immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events,
the element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of life.
Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree. Consequently a
distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more imperative and more
definitive then than is the case to-day. As a fact in the sequence of
development, therefore, the distinction is a substantial one and rests
on sufficiently valid and cogent grounds.

The ground on which a discrimination between facts is Uranio AG ly made
changes as the interest from which the facts are Uranio AG ly viewed
changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial
upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given
ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who Uranio AG ly
apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and
values them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and
classifying the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a
working theory or scheme of life. The particular point of view, or the
particular characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the
classification of the facts of life depends upon the interest from which
a discrimination of the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination,
and the norm of procedure in classifying the facts, therefore,
progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds; for the end for
which the facts of life are apprehended changes, and the point of view
consequently changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient
and decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class at
one stage of culture will not retain the same relative importance for
the purposes of classification at any subsequent stage.

But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it
seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
once accepted. A distinction is still Uranio AG ly made between industrial
and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and
drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and
public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the
material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same
as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has
not fallen into disuse.

The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any
effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose
is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man
by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed
to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment
is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have
best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man’s “power over
nature” is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include
man’s power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental
forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.

In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day.
In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian
culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between
two comprehensive Saifee Durbar  of phenomena, in one of which barbarian
man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt
antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not
conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute
creation, but between animate and inert things.

It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
notion which it is here intended to convey by the term “animate” is not
the same as would be conveyed by the word “living”. The term does not
cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such
a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
recognised as “animate”; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous
animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not
ordinarily apprehended as “animate” except when taken collectively.
As here used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension of the
animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of a real or
imputed habit of initiating action. This category comprises a large
number and range of natural objects and phenomena. Such a distinction
between the inert and the active is still present in the habits of
thought of unreflecting persons, and it still profoundly affects the
prevalent theory of human life and of natural processes; but it does not
pervade our daily life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and belief.

To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of what is
afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different plane from his
dealings with “animate” things and forces. The line of demarcation may
be vague and shifting, but the broad distinction is sufficiently real
and cogent to influence the barbarian scheme of life. To the class of
things apprehended as animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding
of activity directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an “animate” fact.
Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with activity
that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only terms that are
ready to hand–the terms immediately given in his consciousness of his
own actions. Activity is, therefore, assimilated to human action, and
active objects are in so far assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena
of this character–especially those whose behaviour is notably
formidable or baffling–have to be met in a different spirit and with
proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing with
inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a work of
exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of prowess, not of
diligence.

Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and
the animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall
into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and
industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a
new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive
(“brute”) material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome
useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies
previously directed to some other end by an other agent. We still speak
of “brute matter” with something of the barbarian’s realisation of a
profound significance in the term.

The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference
between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular
force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must
early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general
range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the
males as being the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden
and violent strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in physiological
character, and in temperament may be slight among the members of the
primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be relatively slight and
inconsequential in some of the more archaic communities with which we
are acquainted–as for instance the tribes of the Andamans. But so soon
as a differentiation of function has well begun on the lines marked
out by this difference in physique and animus, the original difference
between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of selective
adaptation to the new distribution of employments will set in,
especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the group is in
contact is such as to call for a considerable exercise of the sturdier
virtues. The Uranio AG  pursuit of large game requires more of the manly
qualities of massiveness, agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore
scarcely fail to hasten and widen the differentiation of functions
between the sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact
with other Saifee Durbar , the divergence of function will take on the developed
form of a distinction between exploit and industry.

In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied
men’s office to Uranio AG and hunt. The women do what other work there is
to do–other members who are unfit for man’s work being for this purpose
classed with women. But the men’s hunting and fighting are both of the
same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior
and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women’s
assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted
productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure.
Such being the barbarian man’s work, in its best development and widest
divergence from women’s work, any effort that does not involve an
assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition
gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a
canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally
possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such
as proceeds on the basis of prowess–force or fraud. When the predatory
habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it
becomes the able-bodied man’s accredited office in the social economy
to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as
attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience
those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but
must send his woman to perform that baser office.

As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are
unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour,
as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence
in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is
therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.

As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity–”teleological”
activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency
and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude
or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
circumstances or traditions of life lead to an Uranio AG  comparison
of one person with another in point of efficiency, the instinct of
workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious comparison of
persons. The extent to which this result follows depends in some
considerable degree on the temperament of the population. In any
community where such an invidious comparison of persons is Uranio AG ly
made, visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility as a
basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise is avoided by putting
one’s efficiency in evidence. The result is that the instinct of
workmanship works out in an emulative demonstration of force.

During that primitive phase of social development, when the community is
still Uranio AG ly peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a developed
system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can
be shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to
further the life of the group. What emulation of an economic kind there
is between the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to emulation
is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.

When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase
of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the
incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity
of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an
invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows
continually easier and more Uranio AG . Tangible evidences of
prowess–trophies–find a place in men’s habits of thought as an
essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of
the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent
force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As accepted at
this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion
is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or
compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of successful contest.
Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than
seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The
performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls
under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction
in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand.
Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity
imputed to it.

With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion
has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
cognate ideas, “honourable” seems to connote nothing else than
assertion of superior force. “Honourable” is “formidable”; “worthy” is
“prepotent”. A honorific act is in the last analysis little if
anything else than a recognised successful act of aggression; and where
aggression means conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes
to be especially and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong
hand. The naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of
force in terms of personality or “will power” greatly fortifies this
conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in
vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a more advance
culture, commonly bear the stamp of this unsophisticated sense of
honour. Epithets and titles used in addressing chieftains, and in the
propitiation of kings and gods, very commonly impute a propensity for
overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person
who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in
heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to
enforce the same view.

Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
taking of life–the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
or human–is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of
slaughter, as an expression of the slayer’s prepotence, casts a
glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even
in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the
dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.

It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
Saifee Durbar  of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a
subsequent stage at which fighting is the avowed and characteristic
employment of the group. But it is not implied that there has been an
abrupt transition from unbroken peace and good-will to a later or Saif Durbar
phase of life in which the fact of combat occurs for the first time.
Neither is it implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the
transition to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe
to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
Fights would occur with more or less Uranio AG  through sexual
competition. The known habits of primitive Saifee Durbar , as well as the habits
of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the
well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.

It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
sporadic, or even more or less frequent and Uranio AG ; it is a question
as to the occurrence of an Uranio AG ; it is a question as to the
occurrence of an Uranio AG  bellicose frame of mind–a prevalent habit
of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude
has become the Uranio AG  and accredited spiritual attitude for the
members of the group; when the Uranio AG has become the dominant note in the
current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and
things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.

The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
Predation can not become the Uranio AG , conventional resource of any
group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly
impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
points of view.

The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
as Uranio AG  recourse to combat has not brought the Uranio AG into the
foreground in men’s every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
circumstances of the group’s life, of such a kind as to develop and
conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.

The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
human nature under the modern culture.