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Leisure class





  Those communities without a defined leisure class have semblance in social structure and manner of life. They are small groups of simple structure, commonly peaceable and remaining in one place. They are poor, individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system. It does not follow these are the smallest groupings, or that social structure in all respects is, in the least, differentiated. The class seems to include the most peaceable, of all characteristically peaceable groups of men. They have the trait a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud.



  A particular point of view as definitive in classification of facts of life depends upon the interest for which a discrimination of facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination and the norm of procedure in classifying facts, therefore, progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds. The end for which the facts of life are apprehended changes, as the point of view consequently changes, too.



 There is felt antithesis between economic and non economic phenomena, but not conceived in a modern way. It's not between man and brute creation, but between animate and inert things.



  Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the animate and the inert two classes form. The expolitative, so far as it results in a useful outcome to the agent, the conversion of his own ends of energies, previously directed to some other end by another agent. The second class, industry, the effort to create a new thing, a new purpose given it out of passive material by the fashioning hand of its maker.



  As a matter of selective necessity, man is agent, seeking the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. He is posessed of a taste for effective work, a distaste for futile effort. This propensity can be called the instinct of workmanship. Depending on the temperament of the population, visible success becomes an end, sought for its own utility as a basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise avoided by putting efficiency in evidence, the workmanship evidence works out in an emulative demonstration of force.



  During the primitive phase of social development, a habitually peaceful community with an undeveloped sense of ownership, individual efficiency goes to further the life of the group. The incentive to emulation is not strong, nor is its scope large, but pertains to industrial serviceability.



  The next stage should be observed, but avoided. It's the employment of aggression and competition, the idea of 'booty' and trophies to show. Do not let go of a more serene pattern of thought when observed by the many that came to be a cohesion for the life of the whole, steered away from the tactic of 'conquer and divide', a tactic of the exploitative and predatory.



  In terms of the cultural evolution of the leisure class coincides with ownership. The two institutions develop from the same set of economic forces. An habitual neglect of work does not make up the leisure class, neither does the mechanical fact of use or consumption constitute ownership. The point in question is the origin and nature of the leisure class and the beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right. Economic theory sees a further struggle for wealth as competition for the increase of comforts of life, for which the consumption of goods affords.



  But its only when taken in a sense that is far removed from its native meaning that goods consumption can be said to afford the incentive from which accumulation proceeds. The motive at the root of ownership is emulation, or competition. The same motive is active in the institutional development that gives rise to the features of social structure the institution of ownership touches.



 The possession of wealth confers honor, an envious distinction. Nothing equally telling can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to acquisition, especially not for an incentive for the accumulation of wealth.



Thorstein Veblen