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nydus/The Theory of Business EnterprisePublic

Thorstein Veblen examines the modern industrial system as a structure defined by the machine process and investment for profit. He analyzes how business enterprise and the pursuit of financial gain serve as the primary forces directing contemporary economic organization.

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Table of Contents

Process

the head of the " industrial revolution"; and (2) there are the patriotic ideals and animosities left as a residue of the warlike political traffic in Continental Europe. Since the new departure, made on the basis of natural rights and modem industrial and scientific methods, the complex of nations and of international relations is a single, not a twofold one. The stage over which affairs, political, industrial and cultural, run their course is no longer Continental or British, but cosmopolitan, comprising all civilized communities and all civilized interests. So that there is not now, as there was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an isolation hospital for technology, science, and civil rights, set apart from the general current of cultural development. Whatever the forces at work in the modern situation may eventually bring to pass, therefore, the outcome must touch all communities in the same way and in approximately the same degree. If the outcome is dynastic politics and

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