Nature of Peace go hand-in-hand. His main critique in the first is that business succeeds by sabotage, by deliberately restricting the creation of supply so that the capitalist can charge the highest price for an item of consumption. The “kept classes,” which include the government (including all diplomatic posts abroad as well) and those who are reliant upon big business for their livelihood, foster and inculcate this sabotage, and thus they have interests that are clearly at odds with those of the common man.

The common man does not benefit at all from business, in his view, and when international conflict erupts over trade the common man, trained from childhood in patriotism and sacrifice to the homeland, unwittingly goes against his own interest to fight on behalf of the businessmen, resulting in even more costs to his own class. Veblen states explicitly in The Nature of Peace that patriotism is based only on the perception of national prestige and can only be used to fight other nations in attempts to prove the superiority of one nation over another; and he advocates in the book a dissolution of national establishments in favor of universal bonds of humanity. This abuse of patriotism is especially fostered when the government is an Imperial monarchy, as in the cases of Germany and Japan, and at odds with democratic opponents like the United States and United Kingdom; he says outright that peace cannot be kept between such opponents except on the disestablishment of one or the other forms of government and complete subversion of its value system (which, he notes, takes time to eradicate through disuse). He writes this in 1917, prior to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and within twenty years the peace that was created but without dissolution of culture at the Treaty was shattered, confirming his prediction. His solution is idealistic, and there is reason behind his opinion, but it is a bit wild.

What’s most intriguing about The Nature of Peace, in my opinion, is its place in the context of texts on peace. My class on classic essays has been reading the peace essays for the last three weeks—An Essay Towards the Present and Future State of Europe by William Penn, A Lasting Peace by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant—and it is clear that over the course of two and a half centuries the problem, despite the desperate attempts of intellectuals and philanthropists to annihilate it, got continually worse. Each of their attempts was built on fostering common ideals of justice and interest. Veblen’s philosophy claims that the conceptions of justice and interest held by those who would be actively trying to establish the peace are corrupt and therefore irreconcilable with their desired end, so the process is worthless the whole way through. And he may well be right.

I have read more book-length works of Veblen than of any other author, fiction or nonfiction, except Mark Twain and Thomas Sowell (I have read six by each of the three authors). He is a strange figure to have captured my attention, and it’s just as likely that I’ve read them because they are all short. Personally I disagree with him, and I find his use of language to be horrible—he violates just about every rule set forth in Orwell’s great essay, “Politics and the English Language,” uses unnecessarily long words and is also repetitive. But he has great ideas, and he is the perfect writer to use as a teacher. So I am teaching The Vested Interests and the Common Man this winter. ( )