Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/845

 REVIEWS.

The Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. By Thorstein Veblen. New York: Tiie Macmillan Co., 1899. Pp. viii + 400, Svo.

A LATE critic of a book has the same advantage as the critic of an old painting. He need not have any ideas of his own. He has learned what the proper thing to say is, and he has nothing to do but to say it. In the present case the proper thing to do is to condemn the book and call it pessimistic, even " cynical." Pessimism now means : looking facts in the face; seeing things as they are; calling a spade a spade. Anyone who does this is deserving of censure as dis- turbing the order of things. If there is one thing that the world does not want, it is truth. Truth is a medicine that must be administered in sugar-coated pills. A very little of it reacts upon the public system and will not go down. This is no modern fact. It has always been so. It is what they used to burn folks for. Nowadays they merely put their books on a sort of moral index librorum expurgandorum.

The trouble with this book is that it contains too much truth. It also suggests a great deal of truth that it does not contain, and this is quite as bad as to tell the truth outright. Galileo and Servetus were not persecuted for v;hat they said, but for the deductions that their persecutors made from what they said. The reviewers of this book base their criticisms almost entirely on the conclusions they themselves draw from what is said in it, and scarcely at all on what it actually says. They forget entirely that it is, as its secondary title states, " an economic study in the evolution of institutions," and they assume in all gratuity that it is an attack on existing institutions. That is a pure deduction, but one for which there is no warrant in the book. Someone has said that the law of gravitation would be attacked if it was suspected of jeopardizing human interests. The history of man is exactly paralleled in the history of plants and animals, but no one has inveighed against the facts of biology, because they concern sub- human creatures. Darwin was soundly belabored for supposed con- sequences to man of his facts, but only for such.

829