A political history of the consumer

Historical Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 709-736

  Kroen, Sheryl ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3042675034     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X04003929     Document Type: Article

References (193)

1. Victoria de Grazia, for example, in the Introduction to The sex of things: gender and consumption in historical perspective (Berkeley, 1996), p. 3, argues, ‘Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, it also became axiomatic that access to consumer goods was a fundamental right of all peoples, that this right was best fulfilled by free enterprise, and that free enterprise operated optimally if guided by the profit motive unimpeded by state interference.’ DeGrazia used this language precisely in order to encourage historians to follow in the footsteps of the authors in this volume, and work harder to historicize these ‘axiomatic’ notions.
2. Lizabeth Cohen, The Consumers' republic: tiie politics of mass consumption in postwar America (New York, 2003).
3. I allude to Karl Polanyi's term intentionally, for I would argue that the post-Second World War reconceptualization of the consumer as the quintessential citizen was as great as the one to which Polanyi originally gave the name, which is to say (in his words), the transformation of'human society [into an] accessory of the economic system’. Karl Polanyi, The great transformation (New York, 1944), P.75.
4. J.-C. Agnew, ‘Coming up for air: consumer culture in historical perspective’
5. reprinted in L. B. Glickman, ed., Consumer society in American history: a reader (Ithaca, 1999), pp. 389, 391–2.
6. De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, p. 277.
7. Edited volumes have tried to bring together comparative histories, and they are critical resources for the historical overview sketched here. See Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and luxury: consumer culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999)
8. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of consumption: the European department store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot, 1999)
9. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption: material culture and citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford and New York, 2001)
10. De Grazia, ed., The sex of tilings; Susan Strasser
11. Charles McGovern, and Michael Judt, eds., Getting and spending: European and American consumer societies in the twentieth century (Washington, DC, 1998).
12. Rosalind Williams, Dream worlds: mass consumption in late nineteenth-century France (Berkeley, 1982)
13. Grant McCracken, Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities (Bloomington, 1990).
14. One could go back further and add to this discussion the long list of excellent studies of Renaissance court culture; for a summary of this literature see Lisajardine, Worldly goods: a new history of the Renaissance (New York, 1996).
15. Williams, Dream worlds, p. 21.
16. For the conception of ‘civilization’ Williams relies upon Norbert Elias, The civilizing process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978)
17. The court society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 1983)
18. for the social, political structures buttressing the regime of consumption, and the fashion system based upon it, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds., The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth century England (Bloomington, IN, 1992).
19. Historians interested in consumption are only now beginning to explore this underside to the Golden Age of Courdy Consumption in Europe, particularly among scholars working on the slave trade. For a brilliant recent book that subtly, but beautifully, forces the connection between conspicuous consumption in Europe and the murderous slave trade, see Robert Harms, The diligent: a voyage through the worlds of the slave trade (New York, 2002).
20. For an economic history of this connection, see Ralph Austen and Woodruff Smith, ‘Private tooth decay and public economic virtue? The slave-sugar triangle, consumerism and European industrialization’, Social Science History, 14 (1990), pp. 95–115.
21. Joyce Appleby, Economic thought and ideology in seventeenth-century England (Princeton, 1978)
22. idem, ‘Consumption in early modern social thought’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993), pp. 163–176
23. Albert O. Hirschman, The passions and the interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph (Princeton, 1977). Writings on the luxury debates in the eighteenth century also deal with many of these arguments.
24. See Berg and Clifford, eds., Consumers and luxury; and Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering the world of goods: consumer revolution and the classification of objects in eighteenth-century France’, Representations, 82 (2003), pp. 87–116.
25. In Simon Schama's An embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age (New York, 1987), a 698-page book, it is somewhat astonishing to find no reference to the Dutch slave trade, despite the fact that in this period it was at its height. But this is typical of this stage of writing about the history of European consumption, that it is completely severed from a discussion of the global context which made it possible. On the determined non-Marxist, non-class basis of Schama's analysis, see especially p. 310.
26. Amanda Vickery, The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998)
27. Carol Shammas, The pre-industrial consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990)
28. Brewer, McKendrick, and Plumb, eds., The birth of a consumer society.
29. David Kuchta, ‘The making of the self-made man: class, clothing, and masculinity, 1688–1832’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, p. 71.
30. David Kuchta has since elaborated on this argument in his The three piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, 2002). It is important to note that historians like Vickery, who emphasize the utterly respectable and restrained consumption of women in this period, do not necessarily contradict Kuchta's assertion that women, in spite of their actual consuming practices, were imagined in other terms.
31. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)
32. Amanda Vickery, ‘Women and the world of goods: a Lancashire consumer and her possessions’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the world of goods (London,1993),PP.274–301
33. T. H. Breen, ‘Narrative of commercial life: consumption, ideology, and community on the eve of the American Revolution’, in Glickman, ed., Consumer society, pp. 100–129.
34. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès,‘ Qu'est-ce que k tiers état?’, ed. with an introduction by Roberto Zapperi (Geneva, 1970).
35. Lynn Hunt, Politics, culture, and class and the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984)
36. for revolutionary ‘styles’ which were explicitly gendered, see Dorinda Outram, The body and the French Revolution: sex, class, and political culture (New Haven, CT,1988). Williams' Dream worlds also treats competing conceptions of consumption as they played out on the revolutionary political stage.
37. Rebecca Spang, ‘What is rum? The politics of consumption in the French Revolution’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., Politics of consumption, pp. 33–50.
38. This literature also reflects the revisionism clear in the historiography on the ‘bourgeois’ nature of the revolutionary struggles of this period. Kuchta, for example, emphasizes the fact that the new ‘bourgeois’ practice of inconspicuous consumption emerged first within reforming aristocratic circles, just as revisionist historians have demonstrated the degree to which reforming aristocrats were critically important in developing practices and ideas associated with the bourgeoisie in the context of the French Revolution. For a terrific example of the revisionist but insistently ‘bourgeois’ interpretation of the coming of the French Revolution through a consumerist lens, see Colin Jones, ‘The great chain of buying: medical advertisement, the bourgeois public sphere and the origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), pp. 13–40.
39. Adam Smith, The wealth of nations
40. cited in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, ‘Material politics, an introduction’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, p. 9.
41. Joyce Appleby stresses that the same logic also is clear in Thomas Paine's writings from the same period, as well as other political economists and moralists of the Scottish Enlightenment. ‘Consumption in early modern social thought’, p. 168.
42. Also see the series of essays in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue: the shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), as well as the broad literature on commercial republicanism.
43. See especially J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975).
44. Breen, ‘Narrative of commercial life’. Colin Jones makes a similar argument about pre-revolutionary France, and the constitution of a public sphere via the consumption of provincial affiches. See his ‘The great chain of buying’.
45. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda,‘ Economics, consumer culture and gender: an introduction to the politics of consumer cooperation’, in Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against capitalism? Consumer cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham, MD, 1999), p. 9
46. see also Michael Prinz, Brot und Dividende: Konsumvereine in Deutschland und England vor 1914 (Göttingen, 1996). The socially democratic aspect of Smith's thinking, the concern for some kind of'moral economy’ also operated in the legal system, which as Margot Finn's work has demonstrated, often intervened against the free reign of laissez-faire.
47. Margot Finn, ‘Working class women and the contest for consumer control in Victorian county courts’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), pp. 116–54. See discussion below.
48. William Cronon, Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecologp of New England (New York, 1983).
49. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming anxieties: consumer protest, gender, and British slavery (1713–1833) (Stanford, CA, 2000).
50. Another consumer history that remains to be written is that of global con-sumerist politics, that would trace the connections between early movements such as these with late twentieth-century movements such as those treated in Naomi Klein, No space, no choice, no jobs, no logo: taking aim at the brand bullies (New York, 1999).
51. Antoinette Burton, The burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial cultures (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999)
52. Napar Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western women and imperialism: complicity and resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992).
53. I am not quarrelling with the idea that such a ‘revolution’ may have begun earlier in England or the Netherlands, as claimed by McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, eds., Birth of a consumer society, or Schama, An embarrassment of riches; rather I am emphasizing the spread of consumer practices, the remaking of society and politics in relation to this, which most of the historians I am considering concur took place across the nineteenth century.
54. See Peter N. Stearns,‘ Stages of consumerism: recent work on the issues of periodization’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), pp. 102–17, which agrees with my characterization of the consumer revolution.
55. see T. H. Breen, ‘The meaning of things: consumption and ideology in the eighteenth century’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption, culture, and society (London, 1993)
56. Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue
57. Colin Jones, ‘Bourgeois revolution revivified: 1789 and social change’, in Colin Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991).
58. Jennifer Jones, ‘Grisettes and coquettes: women buying and selling in ancien regime Paris’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, p. 37.
59. Kuchta, ‘The making of the self-made man’, p. 66.
60. Lisa Tiersten, ‘Redefining consumer culture: recent literature on consumption and the bourgeoisie in Western Europe’, Radical History Review, 57 (1993), pp. 138–139.
61. The literature on the cultural construction of the ‘universal’ liberal subject is enormous, but some of the more seminal works include Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the politics of history (New York, 1988)
62. Carole Pateman, The sexual contract (Stanford, 1988)
63. Catherine Hall, White, male, and middle class: explorations in feminism and history (Cambridge, 1992).
64. Leora Auslander, ‘The gendering of consumer practices in nineteenth-century France’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, pp. 79–112.
65. Mary Louise Roberts, ‘Gender, consumption, and commodity culture’, American Historical Review (1998), P. 826.
66. Mary Poovey, Uneven developments: the ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988)
67. Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995)
68. Mary Ryan, The cradle of the middle elms: the family in Oneida county, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981). The late nineteenth century recasting of consuming women as key political actors is discussed in phase III below.
69. There is a parallel literature, which is just beginning to emerge, exploring(deviant’ and ‘ healthy’ forms of consumption to be pursued by men in the same period. The development of class-specific notions of appropriate and inappropriate masculine consumption is presented by Leora Auslander in ‘The gendering of consumer pracitices in nineteenth-century France’, and has received a new burst of attention from British historians, filling out John Tosh's study of masculinity in the nineteenth century by looking at consumer practices
70. John Tosh, Manful assertions: masculinity in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991)
71. idem, A man's place: masculinity and home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999).
72. See especially the relevant articles in Man Kidd and David Nicholls, eds., Gender, civic culture and consumerism: middle-class identity in Britain, 1800–1940 (Manchester, 1999).
73. Enka Rappaport, A husband and his wife s dresses: consumer credit and die debtor family in England, 1864–1914’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, pp. 163–187
74. Margot Finn's different publications on this subject illustrate this very promising scholarly direction: Margot Finn, ‘Working class women and the contest for consumer control in Victorian county courts’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), pp. 116–154
75. idem, ‘Women, consumption, and couverture in England, 1760–1860’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996),pp.703–22
76. idem, ‘Scotch drapers and the politics of modernity: gender, class and national identity in the Victorian tally trade’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, pp. 89–108. In her ‘ Working class women’, Finn argues that regulation of the economy in the name of the ‘moral economy’ was no less common in the nineteenth century, in the supposed age of unfettered laissez-faire than it was under the mercantile state of the Old Regime. Indeed her work explores the irony that county courts set up to promote free enterprise and freedom of contract were used by the 1880s to question the virtues of free consumer markets and impersonal consumer contracts. See esp. pp. 120, 129, 150, 154.
77. Margot Finn, The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740–1914(Cambridge, 2003).
78. Daunton and Hilton, ‘Materialist polities’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption,p.15.
79. Noel Thompson, ‘Social opulence, private asceticism: ideas of consumption in early socialist thought’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, p. 57.
80. Carl O. Schorske, Fin-de-siécle Vienna: culture and politics (New York, 1987). I am adapting Schorske's useful notion of antiliberal ‘politics in a new key’.
81. Edward Palmer Thompson, Making of the English working class (London, 1963).
82. In her article, ‘Citizens and consumers in the United States in the century of mass consumption’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, pp. 204–5, Lizabeth Cohen lays out the different strains of scholarship that nourish this vision of consumer history.
83. David P. Thelan, The new citizenship: origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia, MI, 1872)
84. Richard Hofstadter, The age of reform: from Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)
85. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's discontent: America in search of a public philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1996)
86. Dana Frank, Purchasing power: consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle labor movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994)
87. Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘The Consumers' white label campaign of the National Consumers' League, 1898–1918’, in Strasser, McGovern, andjudt, eds., Getting and spending
88. Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘Two political cultures in the Progressive era: the National Consumers' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation’, in Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., United States history as women's history (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995)
89. Lawrence Glickman, A living wage: American workers and the making of consumer society (Ithaca, NY, 1997).
90. Matthew Hilton, ‘Women in revolt? The female consumer and the politics of consumption in 20th century Britain’, paper given at conference ‘Gender and consumption’, at the University of Berlin, 9–11 Sept. 2001, p. 8.
91. Cohen, ‘Citizens and consumers in the United States’, pp. 206–207
92. Also see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: industrial workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990). The parallels between the political economy of Smith and that of Keynes regarding the important emphasis of both on consumption are extremely important. The field of consumer studies still needs a serious study of Keynes and the spread of his conception of consumption in theory and in practice across the United States and Europe.
93. Williams, Dream worlds. Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, ‘Les femmes et l’éthique de la consommation en France à la belle epoque autour de la Ligue Social d'Acheteurs’, MSS.
94. Furlough and Strikwerda, ‘Economics, consumer culture, and gender’, p. 19.
95. Belinda Davis, ‘Food scarcity and the empowerment of the female consumer in World War I Berlin’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, pp. 287–310
96. Belinda Davis, Home fires burning: food, politics, and everyday life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
97. Frank Trentmann's article is an excellent example of the effort to reimagine consumerist movements in this period as a public negotiation over notions of social citizenship. See ‘Bread, milk, and democracy: consumption and citizenship in twentieth-century Britain’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, pp. 129–64. The positive argument regarding the emerging definition of social citizenship and the active role of consumer's in fostering this notion institutionally is also developed in Matthew Hilton's contribution to the volume, in his discussion of the First World War Consumers' Council in contrast with the Moloney Committee of the post-Second World War period: ‘Consumer politics in post-war Britain’, pp. 241–60.
98. The whole debate about social citizenship around the work of T. H. Marshall could be usefully rethought in consumerist terms. In recent reappraisals of Marshall's ideas sociologists have begun to move in this direction. See especially T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and social class (London, 1992)
99. Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship today: the contemporary relevance of T. H. Marshall (London, 1996).
100. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and society: the reorientation of European social thought, 1890–1930 (New York, 1958).
101. Susanna Barrows, Distorting mirrors: visions of the crowd in late nineteenth-century France (New Haven, CT, 1981).
102. As of yet there is no historian who has written a comprehensive analysis of the problem of the consumer as a problem of intellectual history in this critical period. Sociologists have taken the lead; see for example David Frisby, Fragments of modernity: theories of modernity in the work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
103. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (New York, 1991)
104. Sigfried Kracauer, The mass ornament: Weimar essays, ed., trans., and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA, 1995), for the kind of thinking about the consumer as fundamentally anti-democratic, or proto-fascist that has been so influential among scholars of consumer culture.
105. Lisa Tiersten, ‘Marianne in the department store: gender and the politics of consumption in turn-of-the-century Paris’, in Crossick and Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of consumption, p. 117.
106. See also her more recent book, Marianne in the market: envisioning consumer society infin-de-siécle France (Berkeley, 2001).
107. Tiersten, ‘Marianne in the department store’, p. 124.
108. For an excellent interpretation from the American perspective of the similarly feminized realm of mass culture, see Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass culture as woman: modernism's other’, in After the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986).
109. For a similar perspective on Germany in the Weimar period see the series of articles in Katherina von Ankum, ed., Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1990).
110. Emile Zola, The ladies' paradise, introduction by Kristin Ross (Berkeley, 1992)
111. For Germany, literary scholars have begun to show that Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene mädchen (Munich, 1989; original version, Berlin, 1932) offers an equally rich source for anxieties and concerns about consumer culture in Weimar Germany.
112. See especially Katherina von Ankum, ‘Gendered urban spaces in Das kunstseidene mädchen’, in von Ankum, ed., Women in the metropolis, pp. 162–183.
113. Michael B. Miller, Bon marché: bourgeois culture and the department store, 1869–1920(Princeton, 1981), already made this same argument regarding the paternal image of the owners of the Bon Marché, and the effort to mitigate the criticisms launched against the new department store by emphasizing its own familial policies, and the support for the family and community at large through philanthropy.
114. For an analagous study of department store architecture in Germany that explores how owners tried to use it to project a certain image, and at the same time to allay specific fears about consumption and politics see Kathleen James, ‘From Messel to Mendelsohn: German department store architecture in defence of urban and economic change’, in Crossick andjaumain, eds., Cathedrals of consumption, pp. 252–279.
115. Susan Kent, Sex and suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914(Princeton, 1987)
116. Erika Rappaport, Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000)
117. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian England (Chicago, 1992)
118. Lisa Tickner, The spectacle of women: images of the suffrage campaign, 1907–1914 (Chicago, 1988).
119. Von Ankum, ed., Women in the metropolis
120. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, eds., Berlin: culture and metropolis (Minneapolis, 1990)
121. Klaus Theweleit, Male fantasies, trans. Stephan Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner, foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich (Minneapolis, 1987).
122. If Tiersten's work demonstrated that commercial leaders reintroduced domestic femininity within the sphere of consumption itself, other historians of the interwar period have highlighted legal struggles over birth control, female employment, and the policies of welfare states to demonstrate the degree to which domestic ideology had gained new currency in these years. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without sexes: reconstructing gender in postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, 1994).
123. Victoria de Grazia best summarizes the pressures exerted by the efforts to incorporate female citizens in the interwar period in ‘Nationalizing women: the competition between fascist and commercial cultural models in Mussolini's Italy’, in De Grazia, ed., The sex of things, p. 339.
124. Leora Auslander, ‘Citizenship law, state form and everyday aesthetics in modern France and Germany, 1920–1940’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics ofconsumption, pp. 109–128.
125. Philip Nord, Paris shopkeepers and the politics of resentment (Princeton, 1986). In the discourse of National Socialists, department stores were also attacked in favour of the rights and privileges of small shopkeepers. In practice, however, big retailers were not curtailed to the advantage of small businessmen.
126. See Hartmutt Berghoff, ‘Enticement and deprivation: the regulation of consumption in prewar Nazi Germany’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, pp. 165–184.
127. Victoria de Grazia, How fascism ruled women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 1992)
128. idem, ‘Nationalizing women’, pp. 337–358
129. Berghoff, ‘Enticement and deprivation’. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive acts: the crisis of liberal domesticity infin-de-siécle France (Chicago, 2003), focuses on the connection between anti-Semitism and concern about the new woman, in ways which historians of fascism will find it fruitful to consider.
130. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im nationalsozialismus: studien Zur rassenpolitik und frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986).
131. Leora Auslander,‘ Remembered homes: the work of memory in post-World War II Paris’, paper given at conference ‘Gender and consumption’, at the University of Berlin, 9–11 Sept. 2001, Yair Mintzer righdy pointed out to me that the confiscation of Jewish possessions, and the subsequent exiling of Jews to ghettos can be see in Foucauldian terms as an effort to define Jews as outside of civilization, here constituted as the world of modern consumption.
132. Berghoff, ‘Enticement and deprivation’
133. Hartmutt Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik: die Regulierung des privaten Verhrauchs in 20.Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1999).
134. Berghoff, ‘Enticement and deprivation’, p. 169.
135. De Grazia, ‘Nationalizing women’.
136. Dedev Peukert, Inside Nazi Gemany: conformity, opposition, and racism in everyday life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, CT, 1987).
137. Berghoff, ‘Enticement and deprivation’, p. 178. In another passage he makes a similar argument, underscoring more clearly the fact that consumer desire often competed with and trumped ideology: ‘The history of advertising in Nazi Germany is a history of conflict between offical regulation and the inherent dynamics of consumerism. Very often Consumers’ desires and commercial self-interest weighed more strongly than ideology and military needs’, p. 171.
138. See for example Philipp Heldmann, ‘Konsumpolitik in der DDR: Jugendmode in den sechziger jahren’, in Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik, pp. 135–159
139. idem, ‘Negotiating consumption in a dictatorship: consumer politics in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Daunton and Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption, pp. 185–202
140. Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedüfnis: Die Geschichte des Konsumkultur in des DDR (Cologne, 1999).
141. Indeed, as Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer make clear in their discussion of post-war German consumption, the material deprivation of Europeans during the Second World War, which continued for many years after 1945, needs to be taken seriously in any study of the post-war efforts to encourage Europeans to expect, and even embrace mass consumption. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered past: reconstructing German histories (Princeton, 2003)
142. especially ‘In pursuit of happiness: consumption, mass consumption, and consumerism’, pp. 269–316.
143. For a similar portrait of the war and post-war austerity in Britain, see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: rationing, controls and consumption, 1949–1955 (Oxford, 2000).
144. Cohen, ‘Citizens and consumers in the United States’, p. 214.
145. Cohen quotes Kenneth Galbraith on this fundamental post-war shift, when he lamented that ‘as a result of Keynesian thinking, conservatives and liberals alike had become invested in an expanding economy as the best way to improve all Americans’ standard of living, allowing them to ignore the need to redistribute wealth to reduce economic inequality, which persisted none the less’. Cited in Lizabeth Cohen, ‘The New Deal state and the making of citizen consumers’, in Strasser, McGovern, andjudt, eds., Getting and spending, p. 123.
146. The new meaning of the republic that corresponds to this shift is explained by Cohen in relation to the shift in historiography on the early republican era from the Progressive historians, like Charles Beard and Carl Becker, who emphasized ‘the democratic struggle of the people against “the interests’”, to the historians of the 1950s, such as Clinton Rossiter and Edmund Morgan, who stressed ‘the more conservative commitments of the nation's founders to political stability, economic development, and international security’. A Consumers' republic, p. 11.
147. Strasser, McGovern, and Judt, ‘Introduction’, Getting and spending, p. 5.
148. Charles T. McGovern,‘ Sold American: inventing the consumer, 1890–1940’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard, 1993), especially chs. 6 and 7.
149. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American dream (Berkeley, 1995)
150. Peggy Jean Kreshell, ‘Toward a cultural history of advertising research: a case study of J. Walter Thompson, 1908–1925’ (PhD dissertation, Illinois, Urbana Champagne, 1989)
151. Ralph M. Hoover, History of an ad agency: N. W. Ayers and Son, 1865–1939 (Cambridge, 1939)
152. Russell W. Belk, ‘Studies in the new consumer behavior’, in Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging consumption: a review of new studies (London and New York, 1995), pp. 58–95.
153. Charles McGovern, ‘Consumption and citizenship in the United States, 1900–1940’, in Strasser, Mc Govern, and Judt, eds., Getting and spending, p. 56
154. S. Walker and Paul Sklar, Business finds its voice: management's efforts to sell the business idea to the public (New York, 1937)
155. Milton Wright, Public relations in business (New York, 1938)
156. Frank Fox, Madison Avenue goes to war (Provo, UT, 1975).
157. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling free enterprise: the business assault on labor and liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, IL, 1994).
158. Robert Griffith, ‘The selling of America: the Advertising Council and American politics, 1942–1960’, Business History Review, 62 (1983), pp. 388–412.
159. Stuart Little, ‘The Freedom Train: citizenship and postwar political culture, 1946–1949’, American Studies, 34 (1993), pp. 35–68. This article lays out the complicated debates about American identity and citizenship in this period in which the Advertising Council played such an important role.
160. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The rise and fall of the New Deal order, 1930–1989 (Princeton, 1989)
161. Gary Gersde, Working-class Americanism: the politics of labor in a textile city, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1989)
162. Litde, ‘The Freedom Train’
163. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward hound: American families in the Cold War era (New York, 1988)
164. Quoted in Erica Carter, How German is she? Post-war German reconstruction and the consuming woman (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), p. 2.
165. Charles S. Maier, ‘The politics of productivity: foundations of American international economic policy after World War II’, in P.J. Katzenstein, ed., Between power and plenty: foreign economic policies of advanced industrial states(Madison, WI, 1978)
166. David W. Ellwood, ‘From “re-education” to the selling of the Marshall Plan in Italy’, in Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson, eds., The political re-education of Germany and her allies after World War II(Totowa, NJ, 1985), pp. 219–239
167. David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and postwar reconstruction (London, 1992)
168. David W. Ellwood, ‘Italian modernisation and the propaganda of the Marshall Plan’, in The art of persuasion: political communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990s (Manchester, 2001), pp. 23–48
169. Rob Kroes, ed., Image and impact: American influences in the Netherlands since 1945 (Amsterdam, 1991)
170. Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945–1949 (London, 1989)
171. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: the dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, 1993)
172. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: the cultural mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana Wolf (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).
173. Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization.
174. Erica Carter, How Geiman is she?, p. 88.
175. Kuisel, Seducing the French.
176. Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered past, p. 313.
177. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, austerity, and the Conservative party recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994), pp. 173–197
178. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain
179. Martin Francis, Ideas and politics under Labour, 1945–1951: building a New Britain (Manchester, 1997).
180. Cohen, A Consumers' republic
181. May, Homeward bound
182. Kristen Ross, Fast cars, clean bodies: decolonization and the reordering of French culture (Cambridge, MA, 1995)
183. Carter, How German is she?
184. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain.
185. In her book Marjorie Beale makes a related argument regarding post-Second World War rethinking of the advertising industry and politics, The modernist enterprise: French elites and the threat of modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford, 1999).
186. Robert B. Westbrook, ‘Politics as consumption: managing the modern American election’, in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J.Jackson Lears, eds., The culture of consumption: critical essays in American History, 1880–1980(New York, 1983), pp. 143–73, outlines the history of using first media experts, later advertiser's, and finally consultants who specialize in the selling of political products. A comparative history of this process, alongside protests which these developments engendered, would be extremely interesting.
187. Cohen, A Consumers' republic, p. 8, for a brief summary of features of the ‘consumerized republic’. There is a great deal of work on the ‘Americanization’ of business and industry, especially for Germany; this will be very usefully integrated into a history which focuses more explicitly on the consumerization of industry.
188. See, for example, Volker Berghahn, The Americanization of West German industry, 1945–1973 (New York, 1986).
189. Howard Newby, ‘Citizenship in a green world: global commons and human stewardship’, in Martin Buhner and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship today: the contemporary relevance of T. H. Marshall (London, 1996), pp. 209–222
190. Marshall and Bottomore, Citizenship and social class, p. 71.
191. Agnew, ‘Coming up for air’, p. 391. On the quick disappearance of such movements as Socialism Now in the former DDR
192. see Harold James and Maria Stone, eds., When the wall came down: reactions to German unification (New York, 1992).
193. Agnew, ‘Coming up for air’ p. 389.