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.