property and liberty essay 2

Prompt in docx.

please only use the readings mentioned in prompt and the ones I provided.

History and Law Website Home Supreme Court and Public Policy – LS 138

U. S. Supreme Court Cases – Edited Property and Liberty – LS 140

PROFESSOR R. BEN BROWN’S
LAW AND HISTORY SITE

Syllabus for LS 140 Pride and Prejudice John Locke

Property in Eve Online Rousseau on Property and Inequality

Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto J.S. Mill – Principles of Political Economy

George – Progress and Poverty George – Ode to Liberty Finkelman -Batter Up

Popov v. Hayashi Treaty of Waitangi Johnson v. McIntosh Dawes Act

Somerset v. Stewart Bryan v. Walton State v. Mann State v. Boyce

Rose – Property Law and the Rise, Life, and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants

Shelley v. Kraemer Bell v. Maryland

Sumner – W hat Social Classes Owe to Each Other Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class

Roe – Backlash Cassidy review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century

Ostrom – Sustainable Development Boomer v. Atlantic Cement

Dan Ariely Ted Talk Dan Pink Ted Talk Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon

Just v. Marinette County Kelo v. New London

Reich – The New Property – Read pp 771-777 Goldberg v. Kelly

Lessig – Free Culture – Read Chap. 5 Lessig – Remix (Optional Source)

SF Homeless Project

Excerpts from The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein VeblenExcerpts from The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

Chapter FourChapter Four

~~ Conspicuous Consumption

In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure class and its differentiation from
the general body of the working classes, reference has been made to a further division of
labour,–that between the different servant classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly
those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a new, subsidiary range
of duties–the vicarious consumption of goods. The most obvious form in which this
consumption occurs is seen in the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants’
quarters. Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious consumption, and a
much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture
by the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment.

But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the emergence of the lady,
specialised consumption of goods as an evidence of pecuniary strength had begun to work out
in a more or less elaborate system. The beginning of a differentiation in consumption even
antedates the appearance of anything that can fairly be called pecuniary strength. It is traceable
back to the initial phase of predatory culture, and there is even a suggestion that an incipient
differentiation in this respect lies back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most
primitive differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later differentiation with which
we are all so intimately familiar, in that it is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the
latter it does not rest on a difference in accumulated wealth. The utility of consumption as an
evidence of wealth is to be classed as a derivative growth. It is an adaption to a new end, by a
selective process, of a distinction previously existing and well established in men’s habits of
thought.

In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic differentiation is a broad
distinction between an honourable superior class made up of the able-bodied men on the one
side, and a base inferior class of labouring women on the other. According to the ideal scheme of
life in force at the time it is the office of the men to consume what the women produce. Such
consumption as falls to the women is merely incidental to their work; it is a means to their
continued labour, and not a consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness of life.
Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a mark of prowess and a
perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially
the consumption of the more desirable things. The consumption of choice articles of food, and
frequently also of rare articles of adornment, becomes tabu to the women and children; and if
there is a base (servile) class of men, the tabu holds also for them. With a further advance in
culture this tabu may change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character; but
whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is maintained, whether it be a tabu or a
larger conventionality, the features of the conventional scheme of consumption do not change
easily. When the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its fundamental institution
of chattel slavery, the general principle, more or less rigorously applied, is that the base,
industrious class should consume only what may be necessary to their subsistence. In the nature
of things, luxuries and the comforts of life belong to the leisure class. Under the tabu, certain
victuals, and more particularly certain beverages, are strictly reserved for the use of the superior
class.

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and
narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.
Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect
to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From
archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the
women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of
gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological
consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as
being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the
indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised
as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the
body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for “noble” or
“gentle”. It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are
conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and
command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain
expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation
visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same
invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the
part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force
even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class
retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the
women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.

This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of stimulants practised by the women
of the reputable classes may seem an excessive refinement of logic at the expense of common
sense. But facts within easy reach of any one who cares to know them go to say that the greater
abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative conventionality; and this
conventionality is, in a general way, strongest where the patriarchal tradition–the tradition that
the woman is a chattel–has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense which has been
greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no means lost its meaning even yet, this
tradition says that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her
sustenance,–except so far as her further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good
repute of her master. The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a consumption directed
to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such
consumption by others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In communities where the
popular habits of thought have been profoundly shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may
accordingly look for survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to the extent of a conventional
deprecation of their use by the unfree and dependent class. This is more particularly true as
regards certain luxuries, the use of which by the dependent class would detract sensibly from
the comfort or pleasure of their masters, or which are held to be of doubtful legitimacy on other
grounds. In the apprehension of the great conservative middle class of Western civilisation the
use of these various stimulants is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these objections; and it
is a fact too significant to be passed over that it is precisely among these middle classes of the
Germanic culture, with their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties, that the
women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified tabu on narcotics and alcoholic beverages.
With many qualifications–with more qualifications as the patriarchal tradition has gradually
weakened–the general rule is felt to be right and binding that women should consume only for
the benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents itself that expenditure on women’s
dress and household paraphernalia is an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the
sequel that this exception is much more obvious than substantial. During the earlier stages of
economic development, consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the
better grades of goods,–ideally all consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum,–
pertains normally to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally, after
the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private ownership of goods and an industrial
system based on wage labour or on the petty household economy. But during the earlier quasi-
peaceable stage, when so many of the traditions through which the institution of a leisure class
has affected the economic life of later times were taking form and consistency, this principle has
had the force of a conventional law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended
to conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an aberrant form, sure to
be eliminated sooner or later in the further course of development.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the
minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes
a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the
best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and
accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the process of gradual
amelioration which takes place in the articles of his consumption, the motive principle and
proximate aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more
elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain the sole
purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such
innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more
excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to
consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.

This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating, drinking, etc.
presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual activity of the
gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,–the man of
strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his
tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the
noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of
various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in
weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time
and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to
change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how
to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he
must know how to consume them in a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in
due form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred
manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and
conspicuous consumption.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of
leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently
put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation,
but they required their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character
to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on
which these usages rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly
adapted to serve this end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a
comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously
for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption of that excess of good things
which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host’s
facility in etiquette.

In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial kind, are of course also
present. The custom of festive gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and
religion; these motives are also present in the later development, but they do not continue to be
the sole motives. The latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may continue in
some slight degree to serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation and
conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they serve it none the less effectually
for having a colorable non-invidious ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic
effect of these social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious consumption of
goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly achievements in etiquette.

As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function and structure, and there
arises a differentiation within the class. There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and
grades. This differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the consequent
inheritance of gentility. With the inheritance of gentility goes the inheritance of obligatory
leisure; and gentility of a sufficient potency to entail a life of leisure may be inherited without
the complement of wealth required to maintain a dignified leisure. Gentle blood may be
transmitted without goods enough to afford a reputably free consumption at one’s ease. Hence
results a class of impecunious gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already. These half-
caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of hierarchical gradations. Those who stand near the
higher and the highest grades of the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of wealth,
or both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker. These lower grades, especially
the impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure, affiliate themselves by a system of
dependence or fealty to the great ones; by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the
means with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They become his courtiers or
retainers, servants; and being fed and countenanced by their patron they are indices of his rank
and vicarious consumer of his superfluous wealth. Many of these affiliated gentlemen of leisure
are at the same time lesser men of substance in their own right; so that some of them are
scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as vicarious consumers. So many of them,
however, as make up the retainer and hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious
consumer without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the other aristocracy of
less degree, have in turn attached to their persons a more or less comprehensive group of
vicarious consumer in the persons of their wives and children, their servants, retainers, etc.

Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and vicarious consumption the rule
holds that these offices must be performed in some such manner, or under some such
circumstance or insignia, as shall point plainly to the master to whom this leisure or
consumption pertains, and to whom therefore the resulting increment of good repute of right
inures. The consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their master or patron
represents an investment on his part with a view to an increase of good fame. As regards feasts
and largesses this is obvious enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or patron here
takes place immediately, on the ground of common notoriety. Where leisure and consumption is
performed vicariously by henchmen and retainers, imputation of the resulting repute to the
patron is effected by their residing near his person so that it may be plain to all men from what
source they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in this way grows larger,
more patent means are required to indicate the imputation of merit for the leisure performed,
and to this end uniforms, badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing of uniforms or
liveries implies a considerable degree of dependence, and may even be said to be a mark of
servitude, real or ostensible. The wearers of uniforms and liveries may be roughly divided into
two classes-the free and the servile, or the noble and the ignoble. The services performed by
them are likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the distinction is not observed with
strict consistency in practice; the less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of the
noble functions are not infrequently merged in the same person. But the general distinction is
not on that account to be overlooked. What may add some perplexity is the fact that this
fundamental distinction between noble and ignoble, which rests on the nature of the ostensible
service performed, is traversed by a secondary distinction into honorific and humiliating,
resting on the rank of the person for whom the service is performed or whose livery is worn. So,
those offices which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are noble; such as
government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the like–in short, those
which may be classed as ostensibly predatory employments. On the other hand, those
employments which properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as handicraft or
other productive labor, menial services and the like. But a base service performed for a person
of very high degree may become a very honorific office; as for instance the office of a Maid of
Honor or of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, or the King’s Master of the Horse or his Keeper of
the Hounds. The two offices last named suggest a principle of some general bearing. Whenever,
as in these cases, the menial service in question has to do directly with the primary leisure
employments of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific character. In this
way great honor may come to attach to an employment which in its own nature belongs to the
baser sort. In the later development of peaceable industry, the usage of employing an idle corps
of uniformed men-at-arms gradually lapses. Vicarious consumption by dependents bearing the
insignia of their patron or master narrows down to a corps of liveried menials. In a heightened
degree, therefore, the livery comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something of a
honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed retainer, but this honorific
character disappears when the livery becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery
becomes obnoxious to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed from a
state of effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the sting of any imputation of servility.
This antipathy asserts itself even in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations
prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country the aversion even goes the
length of discrediting–in a mild and uncertain way–those government employments, military
and civil, which require the wearing of a livery or uniform.

With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers attached to any one
gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like is of course true, and perhaps in a still
higher degree, of the number of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general
way, though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The dependent who was
first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the
later development of the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last. In the higher grades of
society a large volume of both these kinds of service is required; and here the wife is of course
still assisted in the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials. But as we descend the
social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of vicarious leisure and
consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the communities of the Western culture, this point
is at present found among the lower middle class.

And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle
class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of
circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of
vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In descending the social
scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the
master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the middle-class
household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood
by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the
ordinary business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption
rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in
vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is
by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost
assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure
which the common sense of the time demands.

The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a simple manifestation of
idleness or indolence. It almost invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or
household duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end
beyond showing that she does not occupy herself with anything that is gainful or that is of
substantial use. As has already been noticed under the head of manners, the greater part of the
customary round of domestic cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and
effort is of this character. Not that the results of her attention to household matters, of a
decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing to the sense of men trained in middle-
class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of household adornment and tidiness
appeal is a taste which has been formed under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety
that demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The effects are pleasing to us chiefly because
we have been taught to find them pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much
solicitude for a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends that are to be classed
as aesthetic in the proper sense of the term; and it is not denied that effects having some
substantial aesthetic value are sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is here insisted on is that,
as regards these amenities of life, the housewife’s efforts are under the guidance of traditions
that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure of time and substance.
If beauty or comfort is achieved-and it is a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they are-they
must be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the great economic law
of wasted effort. The more reputable, “presentable” portion of middle-class household
paraphernalia are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on the other hand,
apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the housewife.

The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife continues in force even at a
lower point in the pecuniary scale than the requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below
which little if any pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like, is observable,
and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at ostensible leisure, decency still requires
the wife to consume some goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its
head. So that, as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution, the wife, who
was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the man, both in fact and in theory–the producer of
goods for him to consume–has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces.
But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the habitual rendering of
vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding mark of the unfree servant.

This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle and lower classes can not
be counted as a direct expression of the leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this
pecuniary grade does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the leisure-class
scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second remove. The leisure class stands at the
head of the social structure in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of
worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The observance of these
standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the
scale. In modern civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have
grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability imposed by the
upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the social
structure to the lowest strata. The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal
of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live
up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their good name and their self-respect in case of failure,
they must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance. The basis on which good repute
in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the
means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure
and a conspicuous consumption of goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue as
far down the scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata in which the two methods are
employed, both offices are in great part delegated to the wife and children of the household.
Lower still, where any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become impracticable for the wife,
the conspicuous consumption of goods remains and is carried on by the wife and children. The
man of the household also can do something in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does;
but with a still lower descent into the levels of indigence–along the margin of the slums–the
man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume valuable goods for
appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole exponent of the household’s pecuniary
decency. No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous
consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not given up except under
stress of the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the
last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no
country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to deny themselves
all gratification of this higher or spiritual need.

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears
that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is
common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of
goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are
conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them is a question of advertising
expediency simply, except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety, springing
from a different source. On grounds of expediency the preference may be given to the one or
the other at different stages of the economic development. The question is, which of the two
methods will most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired to affect. Usage
has answered this question in different ways under different circumstances.

So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact enough to be effectually
reached by common notoriety alone that is to say, so long as the human environment to which
the individual is required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within his
sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip–so long the one method is about as
effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about equally well during the earlier stages of
social growth. But when the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach a
wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as an ordinary means of
decency. This is especially true during the later, peaceable economic stage. The means of
communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation
of many persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than the display of
goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct
observation.

The modern organization of industry works in the same direction also by another line. The
exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently place individuals and households in
juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition.
One’s neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one’s neighbors, or even
acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high degree of utility. The only
practicable means of impressing one’s pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of
one’s everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In the modern community
there is also a more frequent attendance at large gatherings of people to whom one’s everyday
life is unknown; in such places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the
like. In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain one’s self-complacency under
their observation, the signature of one’s pecuniary strength should be written in characters
which he who runs may read. It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of the development
is in the direction of heightening the utility of conspicuous consumption as compared with
leisure.

It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a means of repute, as well as the
insistence on it as an element of decency, is at its best in those portions of the community where
the human contact of the individual is widest and the mobility of the population is greatest.
Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of the urban than of
the rural population, and the claim is also more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up
a decent appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent than the
latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and his wife and daughters are
notoriously less modish in their dress, as well as less urbane in their manners, than the city
artisan’s family with an equal income. It is not that the city population is by nature much more
eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor has the rural
population less regard for pecuniary decency. But the provocation to this line of evidence, as
well as its transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method is therefore more
readily resorted to, and in the struggle to outdo one another the city population push their
normal standard of conspicuous consumption to a higher point, with the result that a relatively
greater expenditure in this direction is required to indicate a given degree of pecuniary decency
in the city. The requirement of conformity to this higher conventional standard becomes
mandatory. The standard of decency is higher, class for class, and this requirement of decent
appearance must be lived up to on pain of losing caste.

Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city than in the country.
Among the country population its place is to some extent taken by savings and home comforts
known through the medium of neighborhood gossip sufficiently to serve the like general
purpose of Pecuniary repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in–where the
indulgence is found–are of course also in great part to be classed as items of conspicuous
consumption; and much the same is to be said of the savings. The smaller amount of the savings
laid by by the artisan class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the fact that in the case of the
artisan the savings are a less effective means of advertisement, relative to the environment in
which he is placed, than are the savings of the people living on farms and in the small villages.
Among the latter, everybody’s affairs, especially everybody’s pecuniary status, are known to
everybody else. Considered by itself simply–taken in the first degree–this added provocation
to which the artisan and the urban laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously decrease
the amount of savings; but in its cumulative action, through raising the standard of decent
expenditure, its deterrent effect on the tendency to save cannot but be very great.

A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of reputability works out its results is
seen in the practice of dram-drinking, “treating,” and smoking in public places, which is
customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and among the lower middle
class of the urban population generally Journeymen printers may be named as a class among
whom this form of conspicuous consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it carries
with it certain well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits of the
class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an ill-defined moral deficiency
with which this class is credited, or to a morally deleterious influence which their occupation is
supposed to exert, in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of the
case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms of the common run of printing-
houses may be summed up as follows. Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily
turned to account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the inertia due to special
training is slight. Also, this occupation requires more than the average of intelligence and
general information, and the men employed in it are therefore ordinarily more ready than many
others to take advantage of any slight variation in the demand for their labor from one place to
another. The inertia due to the home feeling is consequently also slight. At the same time the
wages in the trade are high enough to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The
result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps greater than in any other
equally well-defined and considerable body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in
contact with new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or
ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time being. The human
proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to spend
freely in those directions which will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription
seizes upon the custom as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard
of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new
move in advance in the same direction–for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a
standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by everyone in the trade.

The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among the average of workmen is
accordingly attributable, at least in some measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more
transient character of acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the substantial ground
of this high requirement in dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same propensity
for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency which makes the French peasant-
proprietor parsimonious and frugal, and induces the American millionaire to found colleges,
hospitals and museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption were not offset to a
considerable extent by other features of human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically be
impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring classes of the cities are at
present, however high their wages or their income might be.

But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less imperative, canons of conduct,
besides wealth and its manifestation, and some of these come in to accentuate or to qualify the
broad, fundamental canon of conspicuous waste. Under the simple test of effectiveness for
advertising, we should expect to find leisure and the conspicuous consumption of goods
dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty evenly between them at the outset. Leisure
might then be expected gradually to yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic
development goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the conspicuous
consumption of goods should gradually gain in importance, both absolutely and relatively, until
it had absorbed all the available product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare livelihood. But the
actual course of development has been somewhat different from this ideal scheme. Leisure held
the first place at the start, and came to hold a rank very much above wasteful consumption of
goods, both as a direct exponent of wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during
the quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has gained ground, until, at
present, it unquestionably holds the primacy, though it is still far from absorbing the entire
margin of production above the subsistence minimum.

The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction
between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly
because it shows exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic differentiation into noble and
ignoble classes is based on an invidious distinction between employments as honorific or
debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an imperative canon of decency during the
early quasi-peaceable stage. Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is still fully as
effective an evidence of wealth as consumption. Indeed, so effective is it in the relatively small
and stable human environment to which the individual is exposed at that cultural stage, that,
with the aid of the archaic tradition which deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise to a large
impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the production of the community’s industry
to the subsistence minimum. This extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because slave labor,
working under a compulsion more vigorous than that of reputability, is forced to turn out a
product in excess of the subsistence minimum of the working class. The subsequent relative
decline in the use of conspicuous leisure as a basis of repute is due partly to an increasing
relative effectiveness of consumption as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is traceable to
another force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to the usage of conspicuous waste.

This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other circumstances permitting, that instinct
disposes men to look with favor upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use. It
disposes them to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The instinct of workmanship is present
in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances. So that however wasteful a
given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least have some colorable excuse in the way of an
ostensible purpose. The manner in which, under special circumstances, the instinct eventuates
in a taste for exploit and an invidious discrimination between noble and ignoble classes has been
indicated in an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes into conflict with the law of conspicuous
waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so much in insistence on substantial
usefulness as in an abiding sense of the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is
obviously futile. Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its guidance touches chiefly and
immediately the obvious and apparent violations of its requirements. It is only less promptly
and with less constraining force that it reaches such substantial violations of its requirements as
are appreciated only upon reflection.

So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually by slaves, the baseness of
all productive effort is too constantly and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the
instinct of workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial usefulness; but
when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status) passes into the peaceable stage of
industry (with wage labor and cash payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play. It
then begins aggressively to shape men’s views of what is meritorious, and asserts itself at least as
an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All extraneous considerations apart, those persons
(adult) are but a vanishing minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment of
some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape some object or fact or relation
for human use. The propensity may in large measure be overborne by the more immediately
constraining incentive to a reputable leisure and an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it
may therefore work itself out in make-believe only; as for instance in “social duties,” and in
quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly accomplishments, in the care and decoration of the house, in
sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in proficiency at dress, cards, yachting, golf, and various
sports. But the fact that it may under stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more

sports. But the fact that it may under stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more
disproves the presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding instinct is disproved by
inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of china eggs.

This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of purposeful activity that shall at the same
time not be indecorously productive of either individual or collective gain marks a difference of
attitude between the modern leisure class and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the earlier
stage, as was said above, the all-dominating institution of slavery and status acted resistlessly to
discountenance exertion directed to other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to
find some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way of forcible aggression or
repression directed against hostile groups or against the subject classes within the group; and
this sewed to relieve the pressure and draw off the energy of the leisure class without a resort to
actually useful, or even ostensibly useful employments. The practice of hunting also sewed the
same purpose in some degree. When the community developed into a peaceful industrial
organization, and when fuller occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking purposeful employment was left to
find an outlet in some other direction. The ignominy which attaches to useful effort also entered
upon a less acute phase with the disappearance of compulsory labor; and the instinct of
workmanship then came to assert itself with more persistence and consistency.

The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy which formerly found
a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the direction of some ostensibly useful end.
Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of
the leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition of the
otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which discountenances all employment that
is of the nature of productive effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing beyond the most
transient vogue to any employment that is substantially useful or productive. The consequence
is that a change has been wrought in the conspicuous leisure practiced by the leisure class; not
so much in substance as in form. A reconciliation between the two conflicting requirements is
effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate polite observances and social duties of a
ceremonial nature are developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious object
of amelioration embodied in their official style and title; there is much coming and going, and a
deal of talk, to the end that the talkers may not have occasion to reflect on what is the effectual
economic value of their traffic. And along with the make-believe of purposeful employment,
and woven inextricably into its texture, there is commonly, if not invariably, a more or less
appreciable element of purposeful effort directed to some serious end.

In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has gone forward. Instead of simply
passing her time in visible idleness, as in the best days of the patriarchal regime, the housewife
of the advanced peaceable stage applies herself assiduously to household cares. The salient
features of this development of domestic service have already been indicated. Throughout the
entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life,
runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must
be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would
accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with the
abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum; and no standard of expenditure
could result from such a comparison, except the most prosaic and unattractive level of decency.
A standard of life would still be possible which should admit of invidious comparison in other
respects than that of opulence; as, for instance, a comparison in various directions in the
manifestation of moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic force. Comparison in all these
directions is in vogue today; and the comparison made in these respects is commonly so
inextricably bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely distinguishable from the
latter. This is especially true as regards the current rating of expressions of intellectual and
aesthetic force or proficiency’ so that we frequently interpret as aesthetic or intellectual a
difference which in substance is pecuniary only.

The use of the term “waste” is in one respect an unfortunate one. As used in the speech of
everyday life the word carries an undertone of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better
term that will adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and it is not to
be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate expenditure of human products or of
human life. In the view of economic theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less
legitimate than any other expenditure. It is here called “waste” because this expenditure does not
serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not because it is waste or misdirection of
effort or expenditure as viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it.
If he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility to him, as compared with other
forms of consumption that would not be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever
form of expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has
utility to him by virtue of his preference. As seen from the point of view of the individual
consumer, the question of wastefulness does not arise within the scope of economic theory
proper. The use of the word “waste” as a technical term, therefore, implies no deprecation of the
motives or of the ends sought by the consumer under this canon of conspicuous waste.

But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term “waste” in the language of everyday life
implies deprecation of what is characterized as wasteful. This common-sense implication is
itself an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship. The popular reprobation of waste goes to
say that in order to be at peace with himself the common man must be able to see in any and all
human effort and human enjoyment an enhancement of life and well-being on the whole. In
order to meet with unqualified approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the test of
impersonal usefulness–usefulness as seen from the point of view of the generically human.
Relative or competitive advantage of one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy
the economic conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has not the approval of this
conscience.

In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of conspicuous waste but such
expenditure as is incurred on the ground of an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to
bring any given item or element in under this head it is not necessary that it should be
recognized as waste in this sense by the person incurring the expenditure. It frequently happens
that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with
becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may in this way
become as indispensable as any other item of the consumer’s habitual expenditure. As items
which sometimes fall under this head, and are therefore available as illustrations of the manner
in which this principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries, silver table service, waiter’s
services, silk hats, starched linen, many articles of jewelry and of dress. The indispensability of
these things after the habit and the convention have been formed, however, has little to say in
the classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the technical meaning of the word.
The test to which all expenditure must be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the
question whether it serves directly to enhance human life on the whole-whether it furthers the
life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of the instinct of workmanship,
and that instinct is the court of final appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a
question as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question is, therefore,
not whether, under the existing circumstances of individual habit and social custom, a given
expenditure conduces to the particular consumer’s gratification or peace of mind; but whether,
aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and conventional decency, its result is a
net gain in comfort or in the fullness of life. Customary expenditure must be classed under the
head of waste in so far as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making an
invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it could not have become
customary and prescriptive without the backing of this principle of pecuniary reputability or
relative economic success. It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure
should be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of conspicuous waste. An
article may be useful and wasteful both, and its utility to the consumer may be made up of use
and waste in the most varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of their utility; although, in a
general way, the element of waste tends to predominate in articles of consumption, while the
contrary is true of articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at first
glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible to detect the presence of some, at
least ostensible, useful purpose; and on the other hand, even in special machinery and tools
contrived for some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances of human
industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the habit of ostentation, usually become
evident on a close scrutiny. It would be hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent
from the utility of any article or of any service, however obviously its prime purpose and chief
element is conspicuous waste; and it would be only less hazardous to assert of any primarily
useful product that the element of waste is in no way concerned in its value, immediately or
remotely.

Chapter SevenChapter Seven

~~ Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture

It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the economic principles so far
set forth apply to everyday facts in some one direction of the life process. For this purpose no
line of consumption affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is especially the
rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress, although the other, related
principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of
putting one’s pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually, and other methods are
in vogue always and everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other
methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary
standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true that admitted expenditure for display is
more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than
in any other line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace that
the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a
respectable appearance rather than for the protection of the person. And probably at no other
point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by social
usage in this matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items
of consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in the
comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford what is considered a decent amount of
wasteful consumption; so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement
climate, for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And the commercial value of the
goods used for clotting in any modern community is made up to a much larger extent of the
fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the mechanical service which they render
in clothing the person of the wearer. The need of dress is eminently a “higher” or spiritual need.

This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naive propensity for display of
expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste guides consumption in apparel, as in other things,
chiefly at the second remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In the common run of
cases the conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful apparel is the
need of conforming to established usage, and of living up to the accredited standard of taste and
reputability. It is not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in order to
avoid the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and comment, though that motive in
itself counts for a great deal; but besides that, the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained
into our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is
instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we feel that what is inexpensive is
unworthy. “A cheap coat makes a cheap man.” “Cheap and nasty” is recognized to hold true in
dress with even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground both of taste
and of serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim
“cheap and nasty.” We find things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat in proportion as
they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions, we all find a costly hand-wrought
article of apparel much preferable, in point of beauty and of serviceability, to a less expensive
imitation of it, however cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original; and what
offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that it falls short in form or color, or,
indeed, in visual effect in any way. The offensive object may be so close an imitation as to defy
any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value,
and its commercial value as well, declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted
with but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected counterfeit in dress
declines somewhat in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses
caste aesthetically because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade.

But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that
the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort. Simple
conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie
evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of social worth. But dress
has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful
consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and
uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity
of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree.
Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only he expensive, but
it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of
productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated
into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has
received due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for
elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the
wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can
be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the
wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if
not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of leisure-exemption from personal contact
with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe,
the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance
the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot
when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human
use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because
it is the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large
value, but it argues at the same time that he consumes without producing.

The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the
wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the
generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making
work impossible than does the man’s high hat. The woman’s shoe adds the so-called French heel
to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously
makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like is
true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman’s
dress. The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive
and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is
true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.

But the woman’s apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it
argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which
differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of
contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject’s vitality and
rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in
reputability which comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly
be set down that the womanliness of woman’s apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact,
into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women.
This difference between masculine and feminine apparel is here simply pointed out as a
characteristic feature. The ground of its occurrence will be discussed presently.

So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the broad principle of
conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle, and as a corollary under it, we get as a second
norm the principle of conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the
shape of divers contrivances going to show that the wearer does not and, as far as it may
conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive labor. Beyond these two principles there is
a third of scarcely less constraining force, which will occur to any one who reflects at all on the
subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient, it must at the same
time be up to date. No explanation at all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the
phenomenon of changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest
accredited manner, as well as the fact that this accredited fashion constantly changes from
season to season, is sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of this flux and change has
not been worked out. We may of course say, with perfect consistency and truthfulness, that this
principle of novelty is another corollary under the law of conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each
garment is permitted to serve for but a brief term, and if none of last season’s apparel is carried
over and made further use of during the present season, the wasteful expenditure on dress is
greatly increased. This is good as far as it goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this
consideration warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a
controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must
conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change
in the fashions must conform to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the
question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing styles, and it also
fails to explain why conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we
know it to be.

For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention and innovation in fashions, we
shall have to go back to the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated–the
motive of adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this motive
asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it may be stated broadly that each
successive innovation in the fashions is an effort to reach some form of display which shall be
more acceptable to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it displaces.
The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend
itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm
of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted.
The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that
which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.

It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting struggle to attain the beautiful
in dress should be a gradual approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the
fashions should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more types of
apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even feel that ge have substantial
ground for the hope that today, after all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress
these many years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and a relative stability,
closely approximating to a permanently tenable artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would
be very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more becoming than
those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the other
hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are
more becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.

James Madison

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U. S. Supreme Court Cases – Edited Property and Liberty – LS 140

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Syllabus for LS 140 Pride and Prejudice John Locke

Property in Eve Online Rousseau on Property and Inequality

Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto J.S. Mill – Principles of Political Economy

George – Progress and Poverty George – Ode to Liberty Finkelman -Batter Up

Popov v. Hayashi Treaty of Waitangi Johnson v. McIntosh Dawes Act

Somerset v. Stewart Bryan v. Walton State v. Mann State v. Boyce

Rose – Property Law and the Rise, Life, and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants

Shelley v. Kraemer Bell v. Maryland

Sumner – W hat Social Classes Owe to Each Other Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class

Roe – Backlash Cassidy review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century

Ostrom – Sustainable Development Boomer v. Atlantic Cement

Dan Ariely Ted Talk Dan Pink Ted Talk Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon

Just v. Marinette County Kelo v. New London

Reich – The New Property – Read pp 771-777 Goldberg v. Kelly

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Karl Marx on Property from:Karl Marx on Property from:

The Communist ManifestoThe Communist Manifesto

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The
Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold
the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:

(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out
and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of
all nationality.

(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against
the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the
interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and
resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which
pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great
mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the
conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian
parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois
supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or
principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal
reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class
struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of
existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change
consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois
property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally,
but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the
final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating
products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of
personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is
alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty
artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form?
There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent
already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e.,
that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except
upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation.
Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let
us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social STATUS in
production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many
members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society,
can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all
members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property.
It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage labor.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means
of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a
laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely
suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish
this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for
the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith
to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable
character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase
capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In
communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote
the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society,
the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has
individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of
individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality,
bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade,
free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk
about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about
freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and
buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when
opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions
of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your
existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the
population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of
those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form
of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely
so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent,
into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when
individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the
bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be
swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all
that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of
such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and
universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through
sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage
labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating
material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of
producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois, the
disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the
disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere
training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois
property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your
very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and
bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a
law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the
economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature
and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and
form of property — historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of
production — this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded
you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of
feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own
bourgeois form of property.

James Madison

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Mark J. Roe

98 Columbia Law Review 217 (1998)

Portions of this article were published, in edited form, in POLITICAL DETERMINANTS
OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE (Oxford, 2003).

Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=69870

http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=69870

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Portions of this article were published, in edited form, in Political Determinants of Corporate Governance (Oxford, 2003).  

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