The Concepts of Luxury and Waste in American Radicalism, 1880-1929 (review)

The Concepts of Luxury and Waste in American Radicalism, 1880-1929. By Sulevi Riukulehto (Helsinki, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1998) 239 pp. N.P.

This book explores the conceptions of luxury, waste, and--to a lesser degree--consumption held by American radicals during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Riukulehto examines the discourse of a sizable number of, broadly defined, radicals--especially Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, George Herron, Ignatius Donnelly, and Eugene V. Debs--in order to shed light on changes in conceptions of luxury, waste, and consumption during this fifty-year period. As the set of names suggests, the book examines four interrelated kinds of radicalisms: economic, literary, religious, and political.

This book contains a wealth of valuable information; Riukulehto provides lengthy exegeses of the writings of each of the thinkers under consideration. He shows that American radicals of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era shared an aversion to wealth and luxury, but the great virtue of the book is Ruikulehto's realization that they did so for a variety of interrelated reasons. Upon the author's patient exploration, their critiques of the dangers of wealth and luxury, which at first sound almost identical, reveal different components of American radical thought. Riukulehto suggests that critiques of luxury and wealth can be divided into five interrelated genres: religious, economic, republican, aesthetic, and democratic. Not surprisingly, he finds that religious critiques were central even to socialists like Debs. (Riukulehto points out that the prevalence of Biblical references in American radical discourse marked one of the biggest differences from the more conventionally Marxist European radical critiques.) Other common arguments were that luxury was the result of inequality, proof that the "haves" were gaining at the expense of the "have nots." A related argument was that excessive consumption was a result of, but also a prominent cause of, political corruption. Luxury was also seen as symptomatic of the misspending profligacy of the rich. Finally, most radicals held that luxury was "unnatural, perverted, or ugly" (204).

Despite its strengths, the book contains several weaknesses. The first is its lack of a clear thesis. Although the careful typology of critiques of luxury and waste draws subtle and valuable distinctions, the book does not contain an overarching theme other than the unsurprising view that American radicals distrusted luxury and waste. Moreover, the author is forced to point out that luxury and waste did not lie at the center of the thinking of a number of the radicals whose thought he examines. Finally, despite pointing out divergences within the critiques of luxury and wealth, the book mentions, but does not stress, the degree to which American radicals like Edward Bellamy proposed a consumerist utopia as the solution to the nation's deep social conflicts. This book gives short shrift to the American radical celebration of abundance--provided that such abundance be fairly distributed to those who produced it. In other words, if he had more fully included views about consumption, he would have found a greater degree of dissent among radicals and a point of departure for explaining their different economic, social, and moral visions. A stress on consumption would have undermined Riukulehto's conclusion that "All the critics were of the same ilk regarding their main attitudes towards luxury and waste" (197).

A second weakness is that the book's prose is often awkward and unclear. As a case in point, "But we will return to this problematics more minutely in a later chapter" (141). Third, when the book strays from the texts, which Riukulehto examines with care, if not with original insight, it bogs down in pedestrian and, in some cases, dated summaries of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and of such social movements, as Populism, Socialism, and the Social Gospel. Moreover, the book does not situate radical thought within the context of specific debates of the time...