Veblen on Nationalism

I have not figured out what I would like to do with this website. Until a theme solidifies in my head, I suppose the best thing I could do is experiment, to make this my little playground.

Anyway, below is an excerpt from one of Thorstein Veblen’s lesser known books, Absentee Ownership: The Case of America (1923). Veblen is primarily known for his 1899 work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which gave us the well worn concepts of “conspicuous consumption” and “status emulation.” Leisure Class is difficult to read. But it is playful and dripping with irony, a work written with a youthful zeal. Absentee Ownership, on the other hand, is bitter and it’s angry. It is a broadside written by an elderly man who lost hope on the prospect of American institutions serving the interests of the underlying population. He watched as the forces of reaction trampled through American society following the United State’s entry into WWI, and the best he could do was describe the phenomenon. That sounds too familiar, I suppose.

The excerpt is taken from chapter two, “The Growth and Value of National Integrity.”

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all those institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order. The national mob-mind of vanity, fear, hate, contempt, and servility still continues to make the loyal citizen a convenient tool in the hands of the Adversary, whether these sentiments cluster about the anointed person of a sovereign or about the magic name of the Republic. Within a fraction of one per cent., the divine right of the Nation has the same size, shape, color, and density as the divine right of the Stuart kings once had, or as the divine right of Bourbons, Hapsburgers and Hohenzollern have continued to have at a later date; and it has also the same significance for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”