Chapter One: Introductory
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The institution
of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher
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
illustration of the industrial exemption of both these classes. In
the communities belonging to the higher 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 higher 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 lower 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 lower 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
lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in
fully developed form. But this lower 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
illustration. 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 higher 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 lower 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
groups -- 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 groups or
communities that are classed as "savage" show no traces of
regression from a more advanced cultural stage. But there are groups
-- 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 groups 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 groups.
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 higher 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 groups 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 groups 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 habitual 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 habitually
made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually
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 habitually 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 habitually 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 groups 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 habitual 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 groups, 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 fight 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 habitual 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 habitually 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 habitually 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 habitual. 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 groups 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 higher 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 frequency through sexual competition. The known
habits of primitive groups, 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 habitual;
it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a
question as to the occurrence of an habitual 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 habitual and accredited
spiritual attitude for the members of the group; when the fight 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
habitual, 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 habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight 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.
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