Politics & Power Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Nationalism, for Veblen, isn’t a proud inheritance; it’s a kind of original corruption that keeps laundering itself through respectable institutions. The opening biblical cadence - “born... conceived...” - is doing sly work. An economist reaches for theology not because he’s preaching, but because he wants to brand nationalism as a creed: irrational, contagious, and immune to cost-benefit correction. If you treat it as a faith, you stop expecting it to behave like policy.

The specific intent is diagnostic and accusatory. Veblen isn’t merely arguing that nationalism can be misused; he’s claiming its default function is to hijack systems that could serve material well-being and redirect them toward conflict. “Bend human institutions” is the key phrase: parliaments, schools, newspapers, even markets become prosthetics for rivalry. He implies institutions are not neutral containers of public good; they are malleable, and nationalism is the pressure that warps them.

The subtext is also class-conscious. Veblen’s broader work targets the ways elites manufacture status games; nationalism becomes another prestige technology, converting economic grievances into symbolic battles with external enemies. “Dissension and distress” reads like an accounting ledger of social costs - polarization at home, suffering as the predictable output.

Context matters: writing in the age of imperial competition and World War I, Veblen saw modern states turning industrial capacity into organized slaughter, while public opinion was disciplined into loyalty. The line lands because it refuses the comforting version of nationalism as solidarity. It’s solidarity with teeth, and someone always pays.