The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (review)

For a generation, historians in the West have investigated consumption intensively. Seeking the origins of socialism's limits and failures, and critiquing capitalism's substitution of privatized abundance for a communal civic culture, historians have fruitfully explored mass consumption's origins and consequences. But how have different societies made consumption an enduring element in changing political regimes? Why did consumption become the legitimating force in governments around the world? What roles does consumption play in the histories of states, governance, and popular politics? Only in the last decade have historians given significant attention to these issues. ¹ Daunton and Hilton's volume offers a suggestive and nuanced series of essays that re-position consumption (and through it, the editors claim, material culture) as focal points of modern politics and state building. The editors contend that consumption has never generated a single style of politics, issue, or movement; indeed, consumer politics have always been flexible and highly pragmatic, with no dominant goal, coalition, or strategy. The Politics of Consumption offers wide-ranging essays that showcase this diversity by studying consumption's moral economies, the politics of commodities, and the changing relationships of consuming and citizenship.

The editors argue for, and the essays bear out, two interdependent strains of consumption: "The politics of material culture" takes in the arguments, ideas, and campaigns that address aspects of consumption as a broad economic, social, and cultural process; "the material culture of politics," in turn, evokes the specific and contingent histories of commodities, meanings, and issues. The essays track these two trails across three centuries in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, concentrating mainly on the twentieth century. Several essays concern specific campaigns in which the moral economy of commodities, merchandising, or regulation emerged as the focal point for debate and conflict. Daunton, Rebecca Spang, and Frank Trentmann trace the politics of regulation and pricing in gas, rum, and bread, respectively. Leora Auslander's rich essay, examining furniture design, consumption patterns, and citizenship in France and Germany between the two world wars suggests that goods themselves influenced civic practices and ideals, although in widely asymmetrical ways in the two nations. Margot Finn argues that late nineteenth-century social dislocations and discontents, merchandising practices, and regulatory conflicts compelled Scottish drapers to mount public-relations campaigns grounding their work in deeply held ideas of national identity and tradition. Each of these essays demonstrates the role of the quotidian in revealing broader structural changes—modernization, racial proliferation, and political consolidation—at work in their respective societies.

A second group of essays traces the larger politics of consumption. Lizabeth Cohen outlines the structural transformation of the United States into a "Consumer's Republic" centered around the "customer-citizen." This same citizen, Meg Jacobs argues, emerged at mid-century as the locus for a "politics of purchasing power" undergirded by U.S. fiscal, social, and industrial policies. Hilton and Gunnar Trumbull analyze postwar consumption in Britain, France, and Germany, showing how three different political cultures and economies generated vastly divergent consumer politics. Britain saw a turn away from collectivist alternatives toward a producer-dominated consumers' interest. Labor influence made France an activist consumer regime, and West Germany's postwar quiescence fostered a technocratic consumer presence outside government.

These fine essays offer a kaleidoscopic look at consumption during the industrial era. Showing convincingly that consumption can never be fully extracted from state policies and national economies, they also argue for the counter-significance of the local and the specific. Nonetheless, they only haltingly realize the promise of the volume's title. Auslander, Trentmann, and Spang alone pay much attention to "material culture"—the particular histories and attributes of goods. In bringing the state back in once and for all, culture is nearly crowded out.

This collection treats politics and consumption...