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  • Daniel Horowitz and the Pleasures of Consumer History
  • Lawrence B. Glickman (bio)
Daniel Horowitz. Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 528 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $34.95.

A passage characteristic of Daniel Horowitz’s style and approach occurs on page 281 of Consuming Pleasures, an examination of how intellectuals in the United States and Europe in the postwar years have understood the moral significance of consumer society. In the midst of an analysis of Tom Wolfe’s influential 1963 essay on California custom-car culture, Horowitz notes that Wolfe was “unknowingly following Jürgen Habermas, who had written in 1954 that ‘the latest auto shows have become more important than the museums displaying the latest art.’” A few pages later, Horowitz points us to a review by the British cultural studies pioneer Richard Hoggart of Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Steamline Baby. Hoggart disliked the book and condemned Wolfe’s “hectic knowingness” (p. 285). Earlier in the book, we learn that Erich Fromm served as David Riesman’s psychoanalyst in the 1940s (p. 124). It is typical of Horowitz, who has long sought to uncover every vector of influence on the development of ideas, to point out far-flung intertextual and interpersonal connections among writers and thinkers, ones that would not be apparent to scholars focused exclusively on canonical texts. And so he relates thinkers to one another and also focuses on the intellectual development of the ideas and concepts of each based on the person’s childhood, education, teachers, and readings.

Consuming Pleasures is the most recent book in Horowitz’s expansive examination of evolving attitudes toward consumption, a project that began with The Morality of Spending, published in 1985, and continued with The Anxieties of Affluence in 2004. Along the way, Horowitz has also produced intellectual biographies of Vance Packard and Betty Friedan and edited two books for the Bedford Series in History and Culture, one on Packard’s writings and the other on Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech.1 All of these projects began as case studies for Horowitz’s longstanding interest in the history of attitudes toward consumption, popular culture, and affluence. (Indeed, these [End Page 181] topics all feature in Anxieties of Affluence.) In this trajectory, Consuming Pleasures is the latest report in a remarkable seven-book, forty-year examination of how intellectuals, broadly defined, have understood the meaning and moral significance of consumption. Although the broad topic (consumer society) and approach (intellectual biography) has been consistent, each work has followed a unique path, driven, as Horowitz is, by the particularities of individual and group intellectual discourse—and by how it is not only biography, but also cultural and political context that condition such discourse. He is particularly attuned to the interaction of ideas and context, both within individuals and among groups.

When Horowitz began thinking about the moral consequences of affluence in the 1970s, consumer history did not exist as a field. It is in no small part due to the influence of his scholarship and his generosity to younger scholars that the field has grown. His work helped create and legitimize a project that now covers all periods of U.S. history and many different subfields. And his willingness to comment on panels of young scholars and read manuscripts, often with approaches quite different from his own, played no small role in consumer history’s efflorescence. (Full disclosure: I am one of the many scholars who have benefited from Horowitz’s attention and support.)

Yet Horowitz has blazed a unique trail. Not many others have followed his attempt to uncover the project that has motivated him, what he calls “the story of how intellectuals have responded to affluence and consumer society” (p. x). While most consumer historians tend to approach the subject from the perspective of social, cultural, or political history, Horowitz has consistently practiced a capacious form of intellectual history, with a special focus on group biography. In writing intellectual history, Horowitz casts his net widely. If he does not practice the study of folk culture that Lawrence W. Levine employed in Black Culture and Black Consciousness...

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