“Agrarians” Versus “Industrializers”

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In his bookImperial Germany and the Industrial RevolutionThorstein Veblen argued that the relative lateness of the advent of German industrialization permitted her to avoid “the penalty of taking the lead”. She could borrow on a massive scale from the accumulated knowledge and technology of already industrialized societies. While this judgment may hold true on the purely technological level, it is not true that German society made the transition from the basically agrarian-commercial society of the mid-nineteenth century to the predominantly industrial society of the twentieth century without penalties. In recent years specialists on the developing nations have directed our attention to the dislocation, hardships, and complexity which the processes of industrialisation, urbanization, and modernization are introducing into traditional societies. In our scholarly concern for the problems of development in the non-Western world, we have, until quite recently, tended to forget that large segments of the populations of European societies had to be “dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century”, to use Adlai Stevenson's telling phrase. In the case of Germany around 1900 only part of the nation was brought into the new era while another sizeable portion of the population, to Germany's later misfortune, was aided by the Imperial Establishment in its efforts to build a protective wall around itself to keep out the new machine age. I shall argue that the strongest part of that wall was erected in the years between 1894 and 1902, between the fall of Caprivi and the passage of the protective tariff of 1902. In these years German society endured an economic and intellectual crisis which extended beyond merely the selfish attempts of the East Elbian Junkers to maintain their economic and political position. Peasant proprietors were deeply involved. Artisans were affected. And even the leading theoreticians of the Social Democratic party stood confused before the crisis.

This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit: