The Theory of Leisure Class - Research Paper Example

The Theory of Leisure In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure coincides with the beginning of ownership (Dugger,1992). This is necessarily the case, for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces. In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different aspects of the same general facts of social structure. It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand (Gruchy, 2007). An habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership. The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful articles to individual consumption (Hinkrl and Fotos, 2002). The point in question is the origin and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable claim on the other hand. The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained between mens and womens work in the lower stages of barbarism (Hodgson, 2004). Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the ablebodied men of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is an ownership of the woman by the man. There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the custom of appropriating women arose (Michelman, 1969). The usages of existing archaic communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such a view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who appropriates and consumes them (Mitchell, 1936). The habitual appropriation and consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things. The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture, apparently with the seizure of female captives (Rosenberg, 1936). The original reason for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their usefulness as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies gave rise to a form of ownershipmarriage, resulting in a household with a male head. This was followed by an extension of slavery to other captives and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the enemy. The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life, therefore, has been on the one hand a form of marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership. The two institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their exploits. Both also minister to that propensity for mastery which pervades all predatory communities (Rosenberg, 1956). From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons. In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually installed. And although in the latest stages of the development, the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost its utility as a honorific evidence of the owners prepotence (Rutherford, 1998). Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character of a struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary in economic theory, and especially among those economists who adhere with least faltering to the body of modernized classical doctrines (Samuels, 2004), to construe this struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the means of subsistence (Schneider, 1948). But in all progressing communities an ad. vance is presently made beyond this early stage of technological development. Industrial efficiency is presently carried to such a pitch as to afford something appreciably more than a bare livelihood to those engaged in the industrial process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to speak of the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as a competition for an increase of the comforts of life,--primarily for an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of goods affords. The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the consumption of the goods accumulated--whether it is consumption directly by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for this purpose identified with him in theory (Veblen, 1988). This is at least felt to be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course be conceived to serve the consumers physical wants--his physical comfort--or his so-called higher wants--spiritual, æsthetic, intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all economic readers (Hubsh, 1988). But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naïve meaning that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive that lies at the root of ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues active in the further development of the institution to which it has given rise and in the development of all those features of the social structure which this institution of ownership touches (Veblen, 1987). The possession of wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any incentive to the accumulation of wealth. It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where nearly all goods are private property the necessity of earning a livelihood is a powerful and everpresent incentive for the poorer members of the community. The need of subsistence and of an increase of physical comfort may for a time be the dominant motive of acquisition for those classes who are habitually employed at manual labour, whose subsistence is on a precarious footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate little; but it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in the case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive of physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed. On the other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of the community who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of wealth, the incentive of subsistence or of physical comfort never plays a considerable part. Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development. The hard and fast distinction between industrial employment which is productive and pecuniary employment which is sterile here makes its initial appearance in what was to be a frequent and brilliant demonstration (Rutherford, 1998). Veblen is not oblivious to people in noneconomic occupations, but by and large they are classified as superfluities, 2 and he holds up members of the army and clergy as representative of this group. His major inquiries, however, are concerned with those who fall within the economic sphere itself, among whom the undertaker, the speculator, or the banker (much later he was to say the absentee owner) is characterized as regressive. Veblen reproaches Smith for introducing the "unseen hand" as a deus ex machina, but what very quickly becomes manifest is that in casting his "businessman" as villain of the piece he has manufactured a diabolus ex machina. No one would challenge Veblens construct of the businessman if it is taken as an ideal type; otherwise it has all the dimensions of caricature. Yet, one would not be likely to demur when told that men whose sole preoccupation is business are useful to few and are decidedly harmful to the community. Their fiscal or financiering norms rest on the institution of private property; they wish to buy and sell; distribution, not production, matters to them (Rutherford, 1998). The businessmen come into conflict with those who seek industrial efficiency by impeding rational consolidation while the others struggle for its attainment. The first consequence of this reasoning is to dissociate productivity from remuneration. It seems to Veblen that the most lucrative positions are the least serviceable to mankind (Rutherford, 1998). If a law of natural selection were operative in modern society such that it could tolerate no toxic bodies, the pecuniary class would be eliminated. But the natural elimination of an undesirable class also entails that beneficent order which Veblen is constitutionally unable to accept. Spencer and the other meliorative philosophers notwithstanding, economic deterioration is not only possible, it is predictable. Hence Veblen is to be seen once more as in some measure dependent upon Marx, although what he says is stated in an inimitably different manner. Dependent or independent, Veblen cannot bring himself to chant a romantic rhapsody of progress and this indisposition is due to an outlook so saturnine that it has been shared by few others Veblens masterpiece, is essentially an elaboration of these hypotheses. Beautiful embroidery is added and none should be snipped off by clumsy critics. But the lineaments of this book can be read in everything that precedes it. Veblen culminates his presentation with what looks more and more like a candid, if somewhat distorted, photograph of the United States. The selective lens is brought so close to its subject that a variety of disfiguretioras, pockmarks, and pimples, are revealed behind the institutional makeup which ordinarily hides them from public exposure. Veblen divides society once more into those who produce and those who do not. This schism between classes is most obvious in the higher barbarism, which refers to an historical period encompassing such cultures as feudal Japan and medieval Europe. Under its sway, the mark of superior rank is exemption from work. This situation had its beginnings in the earlier barbarism of Polynesia or Iceland where classes are invidiously distinguished but not so minutely and distinctly as at a later date. Here already the lower class, which includes women, slaves and dependents, performs whatever manual labor is necessary. As for the upper stratum, its chief occupations are subsumed under: government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. Other differences inhere in them, but they are all nonindustrial. The leisure class is hierarchized itself so that on its lower rungs one finds himself with other individuals who do not directly participate in, but merely contribute to, the maintenance of sacred and military establishments. In this group of subsidiary wastrels are the munition maker, the animal fancier, the preparer of priestly apparatus. The two preconditions for an emergent leisure class are a predatory habit of life (war, hunting, and their psychological concomitants) and a subsistence easy enough to permit abstention from productive labor. Both are provided by the progress of industry. Under this system, the worthiest functions are based entirely on exploit; the unworthiest functions are necessary everyday activities (Mitchell, 1936).. Industry is defined situationally as drudgery and the people ascribe great indignity to it. On the other hand, exploit is glorified. Status of a high order is granted the fighter and the hunter in a barbarian culture slanted towards excessively aggressive and predatory habits. Barbarian culture differs substantially from the rather peaceful state of savagery--but this difference, Veblen assumes, is less mechanical than spiritual. When the word "spiritual" appears in his vocabulary it denotes something like the intangible evaulation of persons with respect to their worth. The spiritual occupies a place of centrality in his over-all scheme. But what of Veblens insistence on the relative peacefulness to be found in very primitive cultures? The weight of anthropological proof is on his side. Such facts also undercut the theory that agression is simply produced by frustration." When the struggle with brute forces was intense, men were least aggressive(Mitchell, 1936). . With free time on their hands, they could afford to indulge in rapine, pillage, and murder In a word, Veblen holds that social class exists only where there is a mutuality of recognition about it. Income is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the establishment of class (Hinkrl and Fotos, 2002). This profound revision of Marxism takes unreason into account, and thereby clarifies otherwise understandable phenomena. Marx made us aware of class but there is no reason for adhering slavishly to his interpretation of it when morphological data point another way. Privilege is manifested by means of spectacular or conspicuous consumption. These terms are self-explanatory and they are accompanied by many a vivid and homely example. The most extreme case of conspicuous leisure cited by Veblen is that of certain Polynesian chiefs who starved to death through the ritualistic stress of form in preference to carrying food to their mouths by themselves(Mitchell, 1936). . This is no more drastic than what happened to "a certain king of France" who, "in the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his masters seat . . . sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery." In general the examples are not meant to convey such immobility as characteristic of leisure; nor do they equate leisure with indolence and quiescence. Veblen defines conspicuous leisure as the non-productive consumption of time--i. e., as conspicuous waste. His excoriation of almost everything not purely economic blights the book. For there are areas which cannot sensibly be classified as wasteful or as economic; yet in The Leisure Class and elsewhere Veblen tends to ignore them. Fortunately this failing does not impinge upon Veblens class concepts. Regardless of whether polo should be played or should be banned, it is factually accurate to say that the leisure class plays this game and that the underlying population would like to play it. Veblen could save the Marxist Organizer from exercising his larynx in a futile attempt to convince the worker who only wants to emulate his superiors that really he ought to revolt. Refusal to recognize ones "objective" class is tantamount to destroying its social reality, at least on the level of revolutionary political action (Hinkrl and Fotos, 2002) . An elaborate code of good manners is required of the leisure class gentlemen whose obedience to protocol should be as absolute as possible. In great part Veblen concurs with the standard sociologists who view manners as an expression of "the conciliatory desire" and as an extension of gesture. But manners are also survivals of conventionalized acts, "a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and subservience on the other." Punctilios of conduct thrive while observances of rank and titles count for a good deal in many Continental countries. In such societies "good breeding" (the absence of which is so irksome to Elton Mayo and Logan Wilson) has a sacramental value; deviations from what is considered decorous behaviour are repugnant to all men. The behavioral form that go to make up good breeding do not spring up ex nihilo; they are internalized by the aristocracy at great pains (Hodgson, 2004).. Time, application, and expense are all necessary and they fall to those whose energy is not expended in work. The newly rich rapidly acquire vouchers of refinement so that no one will adjudge their lives as anything but honorable. The erect carriage, the masterful presence, the gracious condescension of superiors are not to be confounded with simple courtesy for, unlike it, they constitute pecuniary propriety. Veblen dwells at some length on the subject of personal servants who, if he is right, first people the world in a given phase of the quasipeaceable (barbarian) culture. Together with cattle, when the tribe is a pastoral one, women and slaves are usually prized as a customary form of investment for profit (Hodgson, 2004).. Women of gentle blood achieve a kind of manumission through marriage to the ruling males who accord them preferential treatment over their other chattels. The various gradations between a wife and a slave are blurred: both human objects have a special office--namely, personal attendance on the master. Wife and servant are thus severed and exempted from productive industry, the more so as actual service shades off into pure ostentation. In patriarchal days the housewife busied herself with domestic duties; she was surrounded by a retinue of industrious handmaidens; these have given way to the lady and the lackey (Rosenberg, 1956).. Even in America, where leisure cannot be enjoyed by men themselves they frequently see to it that their spouses are protected from the spiritual contamination of purposeful activity, and married women are made to practice a kind of vicarious leisure. Gentlemen retain body and domestic servants despite the fact that they become increasingly anachronistic as mechanical contrivances displace human effort. The retention of footmen and butlers is directly proportionate to their uselessness. They become habituated to the status of menials and allow themselves to be governed by a rigid formalism that touches their deportment in all its aspects. Veblen slowly shifts his attention from medieval to modern times. Hence "The possession and maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher wealth and position." Veblen himself describes this an idealized and diagrammatic outline of domestic service which in the America be observes, is suffering a sharp decline (Rosenberg, 1956).. Ceremonial decorum and that which goes with it can survive only under a regime of status for which busy people have no time. So far as the comfort and convenience of everyday life are concerned, optimum fulfillment can be reached without a servant class. The infirm and the feebleminded still must be attended, but this is no exception to Veblens rule since trained nurses are obviously not the same as domestic servants. Neither intrinsic beauty nor simple utility determines what the leisure class will prefer to own. Its governing criterion is rarity. Now gentlemen are connoisseurs who dabble in the arts, in weapons, in narcotics, and society gives them a free hand if they abide by the stipulation of seemliness (Rosenberg, 1956).. Dietary prescriptions do not go unaffected by the philosophy of life which is thus engendered. For women and children to drink intoxicating beverages is frowned upon; rare wines and expensive liquors are reserved for the élite. In all this, pecuniary strength remains the touchstone for every layer of industrial society. Virtually everyone--enough people, at any rate, to establish a consensus--accept it and commend conspicuous waste. Futility and waste are essential to the maintenance of upper class status and they form the nucleus of aspiration for most men. But, it must be kept in mind, to Veblen the human personality is so constituted that it experiences a natural disgust in the presence of pure waste. The instinct of workmanship must also be satisfied, however much ascendancy destructive drives may have. In this way a conflict develops between the social demand to abstain from physical exertion and the inner need to work--which is resolved by makebelieve. Appearances or pretenses of useful endeavor are always required, and so the millionaire interests himself in any number of pursuits. He develops a proficiency at cards; he goes yachting and plays golf; his wife keeps busy in philanthropic circles and at card parties(Rosenberg, 1956). . Clingers and climbers, courtiers and retainers, are similarly benefited by a certain contiguity to their betters. A subclass of impecunious, or half-caste gentlemen arises to bask in the sun of a ruling class. The circle of waste is completed by these hangers on who have their vicarious consumers attached to them. A pecuniary standard of living is adopted by the leisure class and it sets up the pervasive standards by which our society makes its judgments. Those on the bottom do not secede and declare themselves to be a proletariat with antipathetic goals. Workingmen aspire to the same opulence that they admire in others; they want to keep up with the Joneses. "No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, foregoes all customary conspicuous consumption. Works Cited Dugger, William M. Underground Economics: A Decade of Institutionalist Dissent. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. Questia. Gruchy, Allan G. Modern Economic Thought: The American Contribution. New York: Prentice Hall, 1947. Hinkel, Eli, and Sandra Fotos, eds. New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure, and Darwinism in American Institutionalism. New York: Routledge, 2004. 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The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1988. Veblen, Thorstein. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1988. Veblen, Thorstein. The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1988. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Read More