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Comment by alephnil | Hacker News Reader

Veblen uses the word "Barbarian" in a way I have not seen before. For example he mentions European and Japanese Feudal societies as "higher Barbarian cultures", and others as "Lower Barbarian". The common use of "Barbarian" I have seen are entirely derogatory, and not something that would have been used in a serious work like this. Anyone that know what its meaning is in this context?

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It's the usage that originated with Lewis H. Morgan. Engels used it in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which Wikipedia has a good summary of:

> Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family

For anyone wondering whether this work is worth reading, I must recommend The Origin of the Family, along with the other works of Marx and Engels. Engels has a wonderfully written The Principles of Communism which was the precursor to the Manifesto. They offer great insights into society.

Wild guess: people who aren't technicians aka engineers and scientists.

> It is the purpose of this memorandum to show, in an objective way, that under existing circumstances there need be no fear, and no hope, of an eventual overturn in America, such as would unsettle the established order and unseat the Vested Interests that now control the country's industrial system. In an earlier paper (The Dial, October 4) it has been argued that no effectual move in the direction of such an overturn can be made except on the initiative and under the direction of the country's technicians, taking action in common and on a concerted plan."

The Engineers and the Price System.

https://ia600303.us.archive.org/33/items/engineersandpri01ve...

So hey, of obvious interest here :)

Edit: So this is where Stephenson gets "barbarians" in Diamond Age. Also Burroughs his technician archetypes.

The original meaning of "barbarian" was akin to "not Roman" or "foreigner" (more precisely, someone not belonging to any of the classic civilizations).

Akin to "villanus" (someone living in a village), it took a derogatory tone later, as someone "uncivilized", but that was not part of its literal meaning.

Greek, in fact. Barbarian has it's roots in βάρβαρος, an ancient Greek onomatopoeic for "people who go bar bar bar", or people who don't speak Greek.

Due to phonetic shifts in the programming language community, we now say that barbarians are people who say "var var var".

'has its roots'

OK, foreigner. But foreigner to what?

I think that he styles everyone except working-class geeks as barbarians.

Given the context and epoch of the book, I'd guess "barbarian" refers to non-Western, non-industrial societies.

BTW, there's a Wikipedia article about the book. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Clas...

Yes, pre-industrial.

But as far as I can tell, so far, he doesn't clearly define the term in the book.

From context it seems clear that it's somewhere between "savage" and "modern" and that it's still rather derogatory.

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