A “Standard” of Living? European Perspectives on Class and Consumption in the Early Twentieth Century

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 55, Issue , 1999, Pages 6-26

  Coffin, Judith G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0033439929     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547999003166     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1.
2. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174.
3. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10
4. Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997)
5. which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999).
6. Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption, 7.
7. The best comparisons are Alain Desrosi`res, La politique des grands nombres. Histoire de la raison statistique (Paris, 1993), 278
8. Victoria de Grazia, “Beyond Time and Money,” International Labor and Working-Class History 43 (1993):24–30.
9. Halbwachs's fellow sociologist provided a useful definition of consumption: “activities and interests which manifest themselves in wants, and in choices on the market.” Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption, 5.
10. For a full bibliography, see Maurice Halbwachs's Classes sociales et morphologie, ed. Victor Karady (Paris, 1972).
11. Biographical and general treatments are in Lewis Coser's introduction to On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992)
12. John Craig, “Sociology and Related Disciplines Between the Wars: Maurice Halbwachs and the Imperialism of the Durkheimians,” in The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, ed. Philippe Besnard (Cambridge, 1983)
13. Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA, 1973).
14. For another analysis of his legacy to sociology, see Gerard Noiriel, Le Creuset Français (Paris, 1988)
15. Sur la “crise” de I'histoire (Paris, 1996).
16. Cited in Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living, 43.
17. On LePlay's position in French sociology, see also Antoine Savoye, Les débuts de la sociologie empirique (Paris, 1994), 55–65
18. Judith G. Coffin, The Politics of Women's Work (Princeton, 1996), chap. 7.
19. Cited in Clark, Prophets and Patrons, 168.
20. Maurice Halbwachs, La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie (Paris, 1913), 151.
21. La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie., 151,157–58.
22. See Halbwachs's interesting critique of LePlay's manner of classifying household expenditures, 162–171.
23. Carle Zimmerman, for instance, groups Halbwachs with the French school of Le-Playans. Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living, 44.
24. Consumption and Standards of Living., 28–30, 101, 374–77.
25. For a historical and critical perspective, though, see Desrosières, La politique des grands nombres, 222–225.
26. For Hazel Kyrk, an American consumer economist in the 1920s, the marginalists' revolution had only begun to remedy the shortcomings of classical economy, but it had framed one of the major issues of the twentieth century. Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption, 13–17.
27. For useful introductions to this intellectual revolution, see Frank Knight, “Marginal Utility Economics” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin Seligman (New York, 1935)
28. William Breit and Roger Ransom, The Academic Scribblers (Chicago, 1982).
29. Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982), 220, 360
30. Gary S. Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (New York, 1993), 24.
31. Halbwachs, La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, 117.
32. The book aimed to find a specific, embodied, and noneconomic understanding of class–to press sociology beyond what Halbwachs considered the abstractions of political economy, Marxism, or census categories. In this as in other respects, his work very much prefigures that of Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA, 1984).
33. Halbwachs, La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie, 125.
34. La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie., 126–27,131.
35. Class as an economic formation, without class consciousness, simply did not constitute “a social object” and was without sociological significance. La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie., introduction.
36. Cross, Time and Money, 162
37. Baudelot and Establet, Maurice Halbwachs, 113.
38. For the following, see: Halbwachs, La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, i-ii, 441–46, 128,290.
39. Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Maurice Halbwachs: Consommation et Societe (Paris, 1994), 23.
40. Zimmerman provides a useful compilation of different findings on this score. See Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living, 50–55.
41. Halbwachs, La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, 443.
42. La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie., 422–428.
43. For example, Fernand Pelloutier, La vie ouvrière en France (Paris, 1900)
44. Richard J. Evans, ed., The German Working Class, 1888–1933 (London, 1982)
45. Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991)
46. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester, 1971).
47. For the following, see: Halbwachs, La classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, 405,422,236, 439.
48. Baudelot and Establet, Maurice Halbwachs, 37.
49. Class in this view was defined by how fully a group participated in collective life and values. The closer one came to the core of any given society, the more “categorical and compelling” the collective rules became. Maurice Halbwachs., 132.
50. See also Savoye, Les debuts de la sociologie empirique, 59–60.
51. Desrosi`res, La politique des grands nombres, 278.
52. On consumer cooperatives, see Williams, Dream Worlds, and Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: the Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca, 1991).
53. Williams, Dream Worlds
54. Cross, Time and Money, chap. 2; and, for a good account of how far France was from any real democratization of consumption
55. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996).
56. Vicomte Georges d'Avenel's aristocratic lament, Le nivellement des jouissances (Paris, 1913), came out in the same year as Halbwachs's study and is an excellent counterpoint.
57. Williams, Dream Worlds, 361.
58. On Tarde, see Williams, Dream Worlds, 365.
59. See also Cross, Time and Money, 21.
60. The most important articles are: Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille aux Etats Unis et en Allemagne,” Bulletin de l'institut français de sociologie 3 (1933)
61. Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille,” Annales d'histoire sociale 12 (1940)
62. Halbwachs, “Genre de vie,” Revue d'économie politique 53:1 (1939), in a special issue titled “De la France d'avant guerre à la France d'aujourd'hui.”
63. Maurice Halbwachs, L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières (Paris, 1933), xi.
64. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., xi.
65. Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille aux Etats Unis et en Allemagne,” 60,52–54
66. Halbwachs, “Genre de vie,” 445, 448, 452.
67. The ILO's study was done at the request of the Ford Motor Company. An International Enquiry into the Cost of Living: A Comparative Study of Workers' Living Costs in 14 European Cities (Geneva, 1931).
68. Food represented 38.2 percent of American workers' expenditures; 45.3 percent of German workers’; 53 percent of Dutch. Halbwachs, L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières, 89. The graphs of black-bread consumption on page 49 testify to the poverty of families with more than three children. Even small reductions in a family's housing budget were signs of real sacrifice, since that spending was already minimized.
69. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., 49–55. In France, reformers arguing for family allocation often underscored these points.
70. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., 43, 45.
71. The differences between Europe and the United States had enormous impact on household routines. Reducing the cost of food took considerable pressure off the women of the house, and so did better domestic technology and spacious, better-organized housing. European women, in other words, bore much of the burden of a lower standard of living. Halbwachs's work also suggested that the expansion of female employment in the interwar period led to the (albeit more modest) increases in consumer spending. Wage work was a means to improved domesticity, in other words, and not its antithesis. On women's work, see L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., 66
72. Halbwachs, “Genre de vie,” 444, 448.
73. Halbwachs, L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières, 152.
74. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., x.
75. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières., 108.
76. See Marc Bloch's enthusiastic review of the volume, “La répartition des dépenses comme caractère de classe,” Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 7 (1934):83–86.
77. Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille aux Etats Unis et en Allemagne,” 51–82.
78. Marjorie Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, in press).
79. Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille aux Etats Unis et en Allemagne,” 80
80. Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, 1929).
81. Halbwachs, “Budgets de famille aux Etats Unis et en Allemagne,” 80–81.
82. Halbwachs, L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrieres, 147.
83. L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrieres., 108.
84. The literature warning against American materialism was enormous. See Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, 1993)
85. for a short summary, or, for examples, André Siegfried, Qu'est-ce que I'Amérique? (Paris, 1937)
86. Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris, 1930).
87. Halbwachs, L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières, 10–15 on “What political economy can learn from household budgets.”
88. Cross, Time and Money, chap. 2
89. Michael Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (Cambridge, 1987)
90. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, 1989)
91. Glickman, A Living Wage.
92. Henri Delpech, Recherches sur le niveau de vie et les habitudes de consummation (Toulouse, 1938)
93. Louis Vallon, Salaires et niveaux de vie (Centre Confédéral d'éducation ou-vrière, 1938).
94. Halbwachs, “The French are decidedly unconcerned about undertaking studies of this sort.” Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 9 (1937):205–7. Efforts to enlarge the Statistique générale de la France and take up research on these questions also failed. Desrosières, Le politique des grands nombres, chap. 5.
95. As she put it, “Contrast consumption, as it shows itself in expenditure and market choices, with production in respect to the degree to which rationality controls the process. Here is the field wherein, it is recognized, blind impulse, suggestion, custom, convention, and fashion, all hold sway … some changes are blindly resisted, other are eagerly welcomed, but in neither case for intelligent motives.” Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption, 291–292.