John F. Davis - "California Romantic and Resourceful"

Esther Chamberlain - "The Coast of Chance"

G. A. Henty - "Saint Bartholomew's Eve"

Franz Grillparzer - "Die Argonauten"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation

T >> Thorstein Veblen >> An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation




With continued advance in the industrial arts the circumstances
conditioning life will undergo a progressive change of such a character
that the joint interest of the group at large, in the material respect,
will progressively be less closely bound up with the material fortunes
of any particular member or members; until in the course of time and
change there will, in effect, in ordinary times be no general and
inclusive community of material interest binding the members together in
a common fortune and working for a common livelihood. As the rights of
ownership begin to take effect, so that the ownership of property and
the pursuit of a livelihood under the rules of ownership come to govern
men's economic relations, these material concerns will cease to be a
matter of undivided joint interest, and will fall into the shape of
interest in severalty. So soon and so far as this institution of
ownership or property takes effect, men's material interests cease to
run on lines of group solidarity. Solely, or almost solely, in the
exceptional case of defense against a predatory incursion from outside,
do the members of the group have a common interest of a material kind.
Progressively as the state of the arts advances, the industrial
organisation advances to a larger scale and a more extensive
specialisation, with increasing divergence among individual interests
and individual fortunes; and intercourse over larger distances grows
easier and makes a larger grouping practicable; which enables a larger,
prompter and more effective mobilisation of forces with which to defend
or assert any joint claims. But by the same move it also follows, or at
least it appears uniformly to have followed in the European case, that
the accumulation of property and the rights of ownership have
progressively come into the first place among the material interests of
these peoples; while anything like a community of usufruct has
imperceptibly fallen into the background, and has presently gone
virtually into abeyance, except as an eventual recourse _in extremis_
for the common defense. Property rights have displaced community of
usufruct; and invidious distinctions as between persons, sub-groups, and
classes have displaced community of prestige in the workday routine of
these peoples; and the distinctions between contrasted persons or
classes have come to rest, in an ever increasing degree, directly or
indirectly, on invidious comparisons in respect of pecuniary standing
rather than on personal affiliation with the group at large.

So, with the advance of the industrial arts a differentiation of a new
character sets in and presently grows progressively more pronounced and
more effectual, giving rise to a regrouping on lines that run regardless
of those frontiers that divide one community from another for purposes
of patriotic emulation. So far as it comes chiefly and typically in
question here, this regrouping takes place on two distinct but somewhat
related principles of contrast: that of wealth and poverty, and that of
master and servant, or authority and obedience. The material interests
of the population in this way come to be divided between the group of
those who own and those who command, on the one hand, and of those who
work and who obey, on the other hand.

Neither of these two contrasted categories of persons have any direct
material interest in the maintenance of the patriotic community; or at
any rate no such interest as should reasonably induce them to spend
their own time and substance in support of the political (patriotic)
organisation within which they live. It is only in so far as one or
another of these interests looks for a more than proportionate share in
any prospective gain from the joint enterprise, that the group or class
in question can reasonably be counted on to bear its share in the joint
venture. And it is only when and in so far as their particular material
or self-regarding interest is reenforced by patriotic conceit, that they
can be counted on to spend themselves in furtherance of the patriotic
enterprise, without the assurance of a more than proportionate share in
any gains that may be held in prospect from any such joint enterprise;
and it is only in its patriotic bearing that the political community
continues to be a joint venture. That is to say, in more generalised
terms, through the development of the rights of property, and of such
like prescriptive claims of privilege and prerogative, it has come
about that other community interests have fallen away, until the
collective prestige remains as virtually the sole community interest
which can hold the sentiment of the group in a bond of solidarity.

To one or another of these several interested groups or classes within
the community the political organisation may work a benefit; but only to
one or another, not to each and several, jointly or collectively. Since
by no chance will the benefit derived from such joint enterprise on the
part of the community at large equal the joint cost; in as much as all
joint enterprise of the kind that looks to material advantage works by
one or another method of inhibition and takes effect, if at all, by
lowering the aggregate efficiency of the several countries concerned,
with a view to the differential gain of one at the cost of another. So,
e.g., a protective tariff is plainly a conspiracy in restraint of trade,
with a view to benefit the conspirators by hindering their competitors.
The aggregate cost to the community at large of such an enterprise in
retardation is always more than the gains it brings to those who may
benefit by it.

In so speaking of the uses to which the common man's patriotic devotion
may be turned, there is no intention to underrate its intrinsic value as
a genial and generous trait of human nature. Doubtless it is best and
chiefly to be appreciated as a spiritual quality that beautifies and
ennobles its bearer, and that endows him with the full stature of
manhood, quite irrespective of ulterior considerations. So it is to be
conceded without argument that this patriotic animus is a highly
meritorious frame of mind, and that it has an aesthetic value scarcely
to be overstated in the farthest stretch of poetic license. But the
question of its serviceability to the modern community, in any other
than this decorative respect, and particularly its serviceability to the
current needs of the common man in such a modern community, is not
touched by such an admission; nor does this recognition of its generous
spiritual nature afford any help toward answering a further question as
to how and with what effect this animus may be turned to account by
anyone who is in position to make use of the forces which it sets free.

Among Christian nations there still is, on the whole, a decided
predilection for that ancient and authentic line of national repute that
springs from warlike prowess. This repute for warlike prowess is what
first comes to mind among civilised peoples when speaking of national
greatness. And among those who have best preserved this warlike ideal of
worth, the patriotic ambition is likely to converge on the prestige of
their sovereign; so that it takes the concrete form of personal loyalty
to a master, and so combines or coalesces with a servile habit of mind.

But peace hath its victories no less renowned than war, it is said; and
peaceable folk of a patriotic temper have learned to make the best of
their meager case and have found self-complacency in these victories of
the peaceable order. So it may broadly be affirmed that all nations look
with complacency on their own peculiar Culture--the organised complex of
habits of thought and of conduct by which their own routine of life is
regulated--as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits
of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come
under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other
nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to
the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether
commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is fit to
survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their
own secret mind these others, too, are blest with much the same
consciousness of unique worth. Conscious virtue of this kind is a good
and sufficient ground for patriotic inflation, so far as it goes. It
commonly does not go beyond a defensive attitude, however. Now and
again, as in the latterday German animation on this head, these
phenomena of national use and wont may come to command such a degree of
popular admiration as will incite to an aggressive or proselyting
campaign.

In all this there is nothing of a self-seeking or covetous kind. The
common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain
from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his
language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God.
There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of
self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded
patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would
perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main
chance; but they make up that substance of things hoped for that
inflates those headlong patriotic animosities that stir universal
admiration.

So also, men find an invidious distinction in such matters of physical
magnitude as their country's area, the number of its population, the
size of its cities, the extent of its natural resources, its aggregate
wealth and its wealth per capita, its merchant marine and its foreign
trade. As a ground of invidious complacency these phenomena of physical
magnitude and pecuniary traffic are no better and no worse than such
immaterial assets as the majesty of the sovereign or the perfections of
the language. They are matters in which the common man is concerned
only by the accident of domicile, and his only connection with these
things is an imaginary joint interest in their impressiveness. To these
things he has contributed substantially nothing, and from them he
derives no other merit or advantage than a patriotic inflation. He takes
pride in these things in an invidious way, and there is no good reason
why he should not; just as there is also no good reason why he should,
apart from the fact that the common man is so constituted that he,
mysteriously, takes pride in these things that concern him not.

* * * * *

Of the several groups or classes of persons within the political
frontiers, whose particular interests run systematically at cross
purposes with those of the community at large under modern conditions,
the class of masters, rulers, authorities,--or whatever term may seem
most suitable to designate that category of persons whose characteristic
occupation is to give orders and command deference,--of the several
orders and conditions of men these are, in point of substantial motive
and interest, most patently at variance with all the rest, or with the
fortunes of the common man. The class will include civil and military
authorities and whatever nobility there is of a prescriptive and
privileged kind. The substantial interest of these classes in the common
welfare is of the same kind as the interest which a parasite has in the
well-being of his host; a sufficiently substantial interest, no doubt,
but there is in this relation nothing like a community of interest. Any
gain on the part of the community at large will materially serve the
needs of this group of personages, only in so far as it may afford them
a larger volume or a wider scope for what has in latterday colloquial
phrase been called "graft." These personages are, of course, not to be
spoken of with disrespect or with the slightest inflection of
discourtesy. They are all honorable men. Indeed they afford the
conventional pattern of human dignity and meritorious achievement, and
the "Fountain of Honor" is found among them. The point of the argument
is only that their material or other self-regarding interests are of
such a nature as to be furthered by the material wealth of the
community, and more particularly by the increasing volume of the body
politic; but only with the proviso that this material wealth and this
increment of power must accrue without anything like a corresponding
cost to this class. At the same time, since this class of the superiors
is in some degree a specialised organ of prestige, so that their value,
and therefore their tenure, both in the eyes of the community and in
their own eyes, is in the main a "prestige value" and a tenure by
prestige; and since the prestige that invests their persons is a shadow
cast by the putative worth of the community at large, it follows that
their particular interest in the joint prestige is peculiarly alert and
insistent. But it follows also that these personages cannot of their own
substance or of their own motion contribute to this collective prestige
in the same proportion in which it is necessary for them to draw on it
in support of their own prestige value. It would, in other words, be a
patent absurdity to call on any of the current ruling classes,
dynasties, nobility, military and diplomatic corps, in any of the
nations of Europe, e.g., to preserve their current dignity and command
the deference that is currently accorded them, by recourse to their own
powers and expenditure of their own substance, without the usufruct of
the commonalty whose organ of dignity they are. The current prestige
value which they enjoy is beyond their unaided powers to create or
maintain, without the usufruct of the community. Such an enterprise does
not lie within the premises of the case.

In this bearing, therefore, the first concern with which these
personages are necessarily occupied is the procurement and retention of
a suitable usufruct in the material resources and good-will of a
sufficiently large and industrious population. The requisite good-will
in these premises is called loyalty, and its retention by the line of
personages that so trade on prestige rests on a superinduced association
of ideas, whereby the national honour comes to be confounded in popular
apprehension with the prestige of these personages who have the keeping
of it. But the potentates and the establishments, civil and military, on
whom this prestige value rests will unavoidably come into invidious
comparison with others of their kind; and, as invariably happens in
matters of invidious comparison, the emulative needs of all the
competitors for prestige are "indefinitely extensible," as the phrase of
the economists has it. Each and several of them incontinently needs a
further increment of prestige, and therefore also a further increment of
the material assets in men and resources that are needful as ways and
means to assert and augment the national honor.

It is true, the notion that their prestige value is in any degree
conditioned by the material circumstances and the popular imagination of
the underlying nation is distasteful to many of these vicars of the
national honour. They will incline rather to the persuasion that this
prestige value is a distinctive attribute, of a unique order, intrinsic
to their own persons. But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates,
notables, kings and mandarins, resting their notability on nothing more
substantial than a slightly sub-normal intelligence and a moderately
scrofulous habit of body could not long continue to command that eager
deference that is accounted their due. Such a picture of majesty would
be sadly out of drawing. There is little conviction and no great dignity
to be drawn from the unaided pronouncement:

"We're here because,
We're here because,
We're here because
We're here,"

even when the doggerel is duly given the rhetorical benefit of a "Tenure
by the Grace of God." The personages that carry this dignity require the
backing of a determined and patriotic populace in support of their
prestige value, and they commonly have no great difficulty in procuring
it. And their prestige value is, in effect, proportioned to the volume
of material resources and patriotic credulity that can be drawn on for
its assertion. It is true, their draught on the requisite sentimental
and pecuniary support is fortified with large claims of serviceability
to the common good, and these claims are somewhat easily, indeed
eagerly, conceded and acted upon; although the alleged benefit to the
common good will scarcely be visible except in the light of glory shed
by the blazing torch of patriotism.

In so far as it is of a material nature the benefit which the
constituted authorities so engage to contribute to the common good, or
in other words to confer on the common man, falls under two heads:
defense against aggression from without; and promotion of the
community's material gain. It is to be presumed that the constituted
authorities commonly believe more or less implicitly in their own
professions in so professing to serve the needs of the common man in
these respects. The common defense is a sufficiently grave matter, and
doubtless it claims the best affections and endeavour of the citizen;
but it is not a matter that should claim much attention at this point in
the argument, as bearing on the service rendered the common man by the
constituted authorities, taken one with another. Any given governmental
establishment at home is useful in this respect only as against another
governmental establishment elsewhere. So that on the slightest
examination it resolves itself into a matter of competitive patriotic
enterprise, as between the patriotic aspirations of different
nationalities led by different governmental establishments; and the
service so rendered by the constituted authorities in the aggregate
takes on the character of a remedy for evils of their own creation. It
is invariably a defense against the concerted aggressions of other
patriots. Taken in the large, the common defense of any given nation
becomes a detail of the competitive struggle between rival nationalities
animated with a common spirit of patriotic enterprise and led by
authorities constituted for this competitive purpose.

Except on a broad basis of patriotic devotion, and except under the
direction of an ambitious governmental establishment, no serious
international aggression is to be had. The common defense, therefore, is
to be taken as a remedy for evils arising out of the working of the
patriotic spirit that animates mankind, as brought to bear under a
discretionary authority; and in any balance to be struck between the
utility and disutility of this patriotic spirit and of its service in
the hands of the constituted authorities, it will have to be cancelled
out as being at the best a mitigation of some of the disorders brought
on by the presence of national governments resting on patriotic loyalty
at large.

But this common defense is by no means a vacant rubric in any attempted
account of modern national enterprise. It is the commonplace and
conclusive plea of the dynastic statesmen and the aspiring warlords, and
it is the usual blind behind which events are put in train for eventual
hostilities. Preparation for the common defense also appears unfailingly
to eventuate in hostilities. With more or less _bona fides_ the
statesmen and warriors plead the cause of the common defense, and with
patriotic alacrity the common man lends himself to the enterprise aimed
at under that cover. In proportion as the resulting equipment for
defense grows great and becomes formidable, the range of items which a
patriotically biased nation are ready to include among the claims to be
defended grows incontinently larger, until by the overlapping of
defensive claims between rival nationalities the distinction between
defense and aggression disappears, except in the biased fancy of the
rival patriots.

Of course, no reflections are called for here on the current American
campaign of "Preparedness." Except for the degree of hysteria it appears
to differ in no substantial respect from the analogous course of
auto-intoxication among the nationalities of Europe, which came to a
head in the current European situation. It should conclusively serve the
turn for any self-possessed observer to call to mind that all the
civilised nations of warring Europe are, each and several, convinced
that they are fighting a defensive war.

The aspiration of all right-minded citizens is presumed to be "Peace
with Honour." So that first, as well as last, among those national
interests that are to be defended, and in the service of which the
substance and affections of the common man are enlisted under the aegis
of the national prowess, comes the national prestige, as a matter of
course. And the constituted authorities are doubtless sincere and
single-minded in their endeavors to advance and defend the national
honour, particularly those constituted authorities that hold their place
of authority on grounds of fealty; since the national prestige in such a
case coalesces with the prestige of the nation's ruler in much the same
degree in which the national sovereignty devolves upon the person of its
ruler. In so defending or advancing the national prestige, such a
dynastic or autocratic overlord, together with the other privileged
elements assisting and dependent on him, is occupied with his own
interest; his own tenure is a tenure by prestige, and the security of
his tenure lies in the continued maintenance of that popular fancy that
invests his person with this national prestige and so constitutes him
and his retinue of notables and personages its keeper.

But it is uniformly insisted by the statesmen--potentates, notables,
kings and mandarins--that this aegis of the national prowess in their
hands covers also many interests of a more substantial and more tangible
kind. These other, more tangible interests of the community have also a
value of a direct and personal sort to the dynasty and its hierarchy of
privileged subalterns, in that it is only by use of the material forces
of the nation that the dynastic prestige can be advanced and maintained.
The interest of such constituted authorities in the material welfare of
the nation is consequently grave and insistent; but it is evidently an
interest of a special kind and is subject to strict and peculiar
limitations. The common good, in the material respect, interests the
dynastic statesman only as a means to dynastic ends; that is to say,
only in so far as it can be turned to account in the achievement of
dynastic aims. These aims are "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory," as
the sacred formula phrases the same conception in another bearing.

That is to say, the material welfare of the nation is a means to the
unfolding of the dynastic power; provided always that this material
welfare is not allowed to run into such ramifications as will make the
commonwealth an unwieldy instrument in the hands of the dynastic
statesmen. National welfare is to the purpose only in so far as it
conduces to political success, which is always a question of warlike
success in the last resort. The limitation which this consideration
imposes on the government's economic policy are such as will make the
nation a self-sufficient or self-balanced economic commonwealth. It must
be a self-balanced commonwealth at least in such measure as will make it
self-sustaining in case of need, in all those matters that bear directly
on warlike efficiency.

Of course, no community can become fully self-sustaining under modern
conditions, by use of the modern state of the industrial arts, except by
recourse to such drastic measures of repression as would reduce its
total efficiency in an altogether intolerable degree. This will hold
true even of those nations who, like Russia or the United States, are
possessed of extremely extensive territories and extremely large and
varied resources; but it applies with greatly accentuated force to
smaller and more scantily furnished territorial units. Peoples living
under modern conditions and by use of the modern state of the industrial
arts necessarily draw on all quarters of the habitable globe for
materials and products which they can procure to the best advantage
from outside their own special field so long as they are allowed access
to these outlying sources of supply; and any arbitrary limitation on
this freedom of traffic makes the conditions of life that much harder,
and lowers the aggregate efficiency of the community by that much.
National self-sufficiency is to be achieved only by a degree of economic
isolation; and such a policy of economic isolation involves a degree of
impoverishment and lowered efficiency, but it will also leave the nation
readier for warlike enterprise on such a scale as its reduced efficiency
will compass.

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